Ghost Brother
by PrincessFoxSpaceNinja
Summary: Morro is being hunted by the Preeminent's generals, who seek to destroy them. He goes to his long-lost baby brother, who isn't a baby anymore and one of the ninjas. One who doesn't really want to help, but does so anyway. Lloyd has multiple panic attacks, Kai and Zane try to keep their relationship a secret and Jay REALLY doesn't want to help Morro.
1. Prologue

_**Morro**_

He had to hide. The other ghosts were after him with vengeance, seeing as he didn't do as the mistress ordered. In fact, he was part of the reason she was dead. Well, more dead.

The safest place would be with the ninjas, but they were his enemies. Wu wasn't around anymore, if what he's been reading in the papers was right. When he searched his memories hard enough, he could find a memory of him when he was little, with his mom and dad giving him his baby brother and telling him to run. And run he did.

His baby brother was only a year old, with big blue eyes and brown hair. Morro was ten. Handing a ten-year-old a baby wasn't the best idea, but it was all they had at the time.

He didn't know what was after his parents, but it got them in the end.

He kept running, using his powers over the wind to go faster while his baby brother somehow knew to stay quiet. He kept running, until he wound up in a junkyard. There was a lady and a man living there, from what Morro could see. When they went inside, he found a box and put the baby inside. He rang to doorbell before he hid behind a dumpster.

The baby was too big, though. He was old enough to walk and was trying to go after Morro.

The lady and the man came out, however, and found Morro's baby brother where the wind blew him down to sit on his butt thanks to Morro.

The lady gasped and took the baby inside while the man came out to see if there was anyone out there. He wasn't sure, but he had a feeling that the man saw him right as he ran away.

Now, back to the problem at hand.

Evil ghosts, after him.

Morro hoped that maybe his little brother, now about eighteen years old, if he was right, would be nice enough to help him. That was why he was standing in front of the junkyard's gates, waiting for whoever the nice man and nice lady who adopted his baby brother called their son.

He was starting to think that it would never happen, that maybe the social services didn't let them keep the baby, but then Morro (who was invisible) felt someone pass through him, calling out to the people who were sweeping the yard.

"Mom! Dad! I'm here!" The lady came running to the guy.

The guy looked a lot like one of the ninjas, but that might've been a simple coincidence. Maybe the ninja just had one of those faces, or maybe Morro was just bad at recognising faces.

"Jay! Come on in, it's been windy all day," the lady told the guy who Morro was sure was his little brother. Same blue eyes, same brown hair. Older, but still looked a lot like his baby brother.

And he looked a little like Morro did when he was still alive.

Well, they had the same eyes and the same freckles.

He had to get into the boy's old room and wait for him to get his stuff, which he was here for, if the lady was to be believed. There was a photo album on the bed, marked _"_ **Jay** " which Morro started going through. It seems that Ed and Edna kept his little brother's real name, which Morro left written on a sticker on him when he was a baby.

It was nice that he wouldn't have to get used to using a different name for the boy.

"I'm _fine_ , Ma! See? My arm's all better. I can carry the boxes myself." And then the door opened.

Jay came in, wearing a grey T-shirt and a pair of blue jeans, staring at the photo album in shock as the pages seemingly turned by themselves. Morro decided to mess with Jay a little by picking up the book and dropping it a couple of times. Jay reacted, then he threw his phone through Morro.

Morro turned visible. "Hey, calm down. I mean you no harm."

Jay threw something else through Morro. "Morro! What are you doing here?! You know what, I don't care. I have a water pistol in my top drawer and. I. Will. Shoot."

Morro grabbed Jay by the arm and pulled him back. "No! I need your help!"

Jay pulled away and turned to glare at Morro. "I'm not going to _help_ you! Are you _insane_? You really messed up back with the Preeminent. You messed up Cole, Kai and you _really_ messed up Lloyd. And _Wu_. He was _heartbroken_. And then you just appear out of nowhere, and ask for help. Sure, Morro. I'll help the psychopathic ghost who broke into my home and…"

"I'm your brother."

Jay didn't say a word. Instead, he fell down on his bed and stared at Morro the same way he did back when their parents were still alive and Morro would try to make him do something interesting by poking him. All he got was shocked by static when Jay started poking back, which led to Morro zapping him right back. That was the look of vengeance.

"No, you're not."

"I am. I can explain later, when we're safe, but I really _am_ your brother. As in, we're flesh and blood, same mom, same dad."

Jay reached for the drawer where he said he kept the water gun. Morro panicked and reached to grab Jay, only to instead find himself reaching out to the drawer instead.

" _Great job, idiot. I just wanted to get my phone."_ Oh no. He was _inside_ Jay. And Jay's phone _was_ on top of the desk. And in his pants' pocket. _"Don't say a word, Morro. My body, my rules. Now, get out before I kick you out."_

"I can't. This was why I was looking for you. There are a bunch of ghosts after me. They're going to kill me!"

" _You're a ghost. They're a little late, don't you think?"_

"Ha ha. Very funny. Make jokes while my afterlife's in danger. But I can't leave. They'll find me and then I'm dead. Deader. More dead. These guys, they're bad news. You have to let me stay! I won't get in the way, promise!"

" _How in the world won't you get in the way? YOU'RE IN MY BODY!"_

"I can pull back. Hide away so you won't even notice me. Nobody will ever know."

" _Nobody's going to notice that I'm acting weird, Morro? We had to deal with you before. I don't think my friends will be too happy when they realise that you've been pretending to be me when those other ghosts come after_ you _. They're still mad at you after you messed up Lloyd, remember? And my girlfriend? Remember her? She's the Water Ninja. She'll exorcize you out of here the moment she figures out what's going on."_

"You'll drown before there's enough water to get me out."

Jay managed to send memories of the ninjas to Morro. Memories from the Blue Ninja's point of view. Yeah, he figured as much. _"Please, get out."_

"I can't. These ghosts, when they find me, they'll continue their mistress' work. They're very powerful, and very dangerous. First me, then the rest of Ninjago. You have to _hide me_!"

"Hide you from what, Jay?" Edna's voice asked from outside the door. "Are you okay?"

" _Listen closely and repeat what I say: I am a ghost who took over your son's body because I am hiding from other ghosts."_

Morro wasn't going to say that to Edna. She'd freak out, or think Jay's gone crazy, neither which were good.

" _In that case, let me have control."_

Okay. He could do that.

He faded into the background, letting Jay take back control of his body.

"I'm fine, Mom." Morro could see and feel Jay grabbing a Fritz Donegan action figure and a Dark Fritz action figure from his desk. "Just playing with these," Jay added lamely as his mom opened the bedroom door to see what was going on.

Edna smiled at Jay. "Okay, sweetie. Can I play too?" Edna sat down on Jay's bad. "It'll be just like when you were little. I would be that little blue girl…" Edna pointed to the blue alien who was Fritz's friend on the show.

"Trixie."

"… and your dad would be that thing with all the arms…"

"Myaxx."

"… and you would be those little guys and we'd play dress up… I think I still have some of those old costumes I made for us!" Edna ran out in search of said costumes.

" _Aw, that's so sweet."_

Jay didn't answer, but he did manage to kick Morro out now that he was in control again. Morro wasn't surprised. Unlike with Lloyd, he wasn't in a hurry and he wasn't trying to take over this guy's life.

"Explain, or else I'll get that water gun and shoot."

Morro took a deep fake breath and started explaining. "You remember the whole mess with the Preeminent? Well, some of her biggest, baddest generals are after me because of what happened. They got the Soul Archer already and they got Lloyd's father, and now they're after me!"

"Well, why don't you just surrender? Maybe then…"

"You don't get it! They control the other ghosts! If they get me, it's over. They want to take over Ninjago!"

Edna, who found the box she was looking for, was in the door at a bad moment. She dropped the box and started swaying. Jay ran over to catch her. Fortunately, she didn't faint. Unfortunately, she called for Ed, who came running in. Jay was starting to panic, which led to his parents panicking, which led to Morro panicking, which led to a miniature tornado forming in the room, which led to more panicking. It was a vicious cycle.

By the time everything calmed down, Jay had a witch's hat on his head, Ed had a cape stuck to his face (and was freaking out because of it) and Edna was waving a broom through Morro.

"I can explain!" Morro screamed.

Jay had an unimpressed look on his face while he was helping his father. Morro explained, telling the nice couple what he told Jay.

"Oh, that's not very good, dearie," Edna whispered. "How are you going to hide?"

Morro scratched his head. "I don't know, Mrs Walker. I was hoping Jay could help me, but he yelled at me and then he kicked me out."

Jay threw an action figure at Morro.

Then he went on to pick up the stuff that flew everywhere due to the sudden wind.

Ed and Edna were both very curious about the ghost claiming to be Jay's long-lost brother and were pelting him with questions.

"How do you eat?"

"I don't need to."

"What if you're thirsty?"

"I don't drink."

"What _do_ you do?"

"I guess I just haunt people."

"Well, that's just sad," Edna said. Morro didn't disagree.

"Okay, ghost-brother, like my mom asked earlier, how are you planning to hide from these generals? And the other ninjas? Because, as you must already know, they're not your biggest fans after you messed all of them up."

Morro sighed. "Okay. There are a couple of things I didn't think all the way through. I didn't know that you were a ninja. But… um… these generals, they can't track me if…"

"If you're in a living body?" Jay asked, putting one of the books from the bookshelf in a box.

Morro nodded.

"No!" Edna pointed a finger under Morro's nose. "Don't you dare!"

Morro raised his hands in surrender. "I wasn't going to."

"I'm going to call the guys and ask them what we should do. We could help you better if everybody knows what's going on."

Something tapped on the windows. It sent shivers down Morro's spine.

" _Hey, Morro, didn't my mom tell you_ not _to do that?"_

Now he was in Jay's body again. The tapping stopped, but Morro was too spooked to leave. Edna was glaring at him while Ed was holding her back.

"Edna, honey, Jay's still in there! You'll hurt him!"

Morro seriously doubted that the tiny woman would be able to hurt anyone. Nonetheless, he stepped back from her, tripping over the box that was still sitting on the floor where Jay dropped it to call the others.

" _Get out, Morro. My mom's pretty scary when she's mad."_

"I heard something at the window. Don't let them get me! They're dangerous!"

Edna was still clawing in his general direction (Bad choice of words), while Ed picked her up to keep his wife away from Jay. And, obviously, Morro.

"Get out of my son!" Edna screeched.

Instead of getting out, as Edna was yelling at him to do, Morro pulled back again.

"Mom, calm down, I'm okay!" Jay jumped up and ran over to try and convince Edna that it was really him right now.

"He's not out!" Edna sobbed.

" _I'm not leaving until those generals are gone."_

"Mom, it's okay. See?" Jay flapped his arms. "Still me. A little freaked out, a little weirded out, but I'm fine."

Edna stopped scratching and clawing at them. Ed let her go, but he seemed pretty freaked as well.

"Where's Morro? He's still there, isn't he?"

Jay nodded. "Yeah." He picked up the box and stared at the contents as if they might hold the answers to his questions. "I have to… um… go back… to the temple. I have to get help."

Jay left the trailer, taking Morro with him.

" _What's going to happen when they find out I'm here?"_ Morro asked.

"Well, they'll either freak out, like my mom did, but with led Dad to hold them back and try to beat you out of me, or they'll try to help." Jay got in his car and started the engine. "Or both."

" _They didn't try to beat me out of Lloyd."_

"That's because we didn't have our powers, and we _did_ try to get rid of you."

Morro sighed. _"Well, at least you can try to explain what's going on when we reach this temple. By the way, what happened to the boat?"_

"You can ask them yourself."

Morro was afraid of this. Those ninjas wouldn't listen to him, inside their friend or not.

"Well, then you clearly didn't think this through," Jay scolded Morro.

Jay was right. When did he grow up so much?

"Shut up, or I'll go swimming right now."

Not that that would hurt Morro, seeing as he was more relaxed in his possession of Jay and the Preeminent wasn't there to force him to do things against his will, but Morro shut up.

"There. That's better. Now I can _think_."


	2. The Return of Morro: Part 1

_**Jay**_

In the end, he couldn't tell the others what happened with Morro.

He came home late. Cole was the only one up, sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee and doodling on his sketchpad. He didn't want to explain everything twice, so he decided to wait until morning.

He couldn't sleep, so he pulled out his phone to tinker a little. He still used the first phone his parents gave him, which he upgraded over and over again and which he dropped into the toilet once, which led to it (the toilet) breaking. His friends and parents gave him a new phone on more than one occasion, which he would use a little, then get bored with after a few days and then mess with a little.

He didn't know how many he had now.

He was snapped out of his thoughts by Lloyd, who started screaming in his room.

"No! No, get away from me!"

Cole and Jay were the first two in the room, after Kai, who was already comforting Lloyd, telling him over and over that it was just a bad dream.

"I thought Morro was in my room," Lloyd told Cole when he asked what happened.

"Don't worry, Lloyd. Morro's not here, okay?" Kai told the kid. "And I promise, I'll never let him anywhere near you again. And neither will Cole and Jay, right guys?"

Cole nodded and poked Jay so he would nod too. "Of course. And Morro's not even around anymore," Cole agreed.

He was about to poke Jay again so he would say something reassuring too, but Jay zapped him before he could even try, making his hair stand up.

"Hey!"

"You're the one who was poking me!"

Lloyd snickered as Jay and Cole started poking each other, Jay adding static each time. When Kai came between them to stop them, Jay zapped him too.

"Jay!"

Of all the ninjas, Kai was the one he had the most dirt on, thanks to Nya telling him stuff and him catching Kai and Zane kissing in the garage _and_ being the one those two dragged along on all those secret dates to look like they were just hanging out. If he wanted to, he could reveal any one of Kai's many, _many_ secrets.

"Sorry, I guess it got a little out of hand there," Cole apologized for the both of them.

Jay ducked out into his room, where he wanted to mess with his new phone until he could go to sleep.

" _What are you doing?"_ Morro asked in Jay's head. He almost screamed. He almost forgot about the ghost. _"It looks interesting."_

Jay ignored Morro as well as he could, messing around with the phone. Until...

"What are you making?" Lloyd's voice came from Jay's doorway.

" _What? It's just a coincidence. I've been here the whole time, remember?"_

Jay turned around to see Lloyd standing in the doorway, wearing his green pyjamas and staring at him where he was working.

"I'm just messing around here," Jay told Lloyd. "See?"

Lloyd came closer to watch. "What're you trying to do?"

Jay went back to poking the phone with his screwdriver. "Well, you know how I sometimes accidently send too much electricity into stuff and they explode?"

Lloyd snickered. "It was pretty funny when you accidently blew up Cole's laptop."

"He chased me around Ninjago City for three hours, Lloyd."

" _Ha ha! Wish I could've seen that!"_

"Shouldn't you be in bed? It's pretty late." Jay zapped the phone on his desk. The screen lit up, then it rang. Then the ringing started coming from the walls. From under the beds (they could hear the others yelling out into the night), the kitchen and everywhere else.

"What did you do?!" Cole yelled from his room next to Jay. "We're trying to sleep!"

"Sorry!" Jay called back. Lloyd giggled. "What?"

"Nothing! I'm going back to bed!" And with that, Lloyd was gone like the wind (bad choice of words).

Jay slammed the phone with a hammer that was sitting next to it to stop the ringing. It worked, but now there were thousands of tiny pieces scattered across the room and he was too tired to clean up.

* * *

"Morning, Jay!" Jay woke to Zane's face staring at him. "I was hoping that you, me and Kai could go to this great coffee shop for breakfast!" Obviously _someone_ was a morning person. But while Jay would usually be up before Zane, this wasn't one of those days. He rolled over.

Zane didn't take any of that.

" _Whoa!"_

"Whoa!"

Zane rolled Jay out of his bed. "Come on, brother, we're wasting daylight and I know you'll love this place!"

" _Come on, little… Wait, did he just call you brother? The robot? Why did he call you brother? I'm your brother! Not him!"_ Jay didn't move until Zane pulled him up and pushed him to the bathroom.

"You take a shower while I go wake up Kai!"

" _Why did that robot call you brother? He's not your brother. I'm your brother!"_

Jay made sure nobody could hear him talk to himself like a crazy person. He locked the bathroom door, turned on the shower and got in the shower, closing the curtain behind him to block as much sound as possible.

The water falling on Jay didn't seem to bother Morro. _"It's been so long since I had a nice shower."_

"Don't say that while you're inside of me!"

" _Okay, then. Now, tell me why the robot called you brother."_

"Zane calls everybody brother. Except for Nya, because she's a girl and he calls her "sister", and Kai, because they're dating and that would be weird, and Sensei, because he's old and lost in time." Jay started washing his hair. "He's my best friend."

" _When Mom and Dad just brought you home, I thought there was a mix-up in the hospital and they gave Mom some kind of weird monkey instead of an actual baby. I kept asking when we were going to get the actual baby until you started looking… human."_

"Why are you telling me this?" Jay found the soap. "I never said I believed you when you said you were my actual brother, and a monkey story's not going to help matters here."

" _I don't know. You were a funny baby. Very quiet, for some reason. But not anymore. Look at you now!"_

Jay turned to face the mirror in the shower to rinse his hair. Instead of his own reflection, he saw Morro staring back at him. He screamed and slipped in the shower. "WHAT WAS THAT?!"

" _I'm sorry! I didn't know that would happen!"_

"Well, it did." Jay pulled himself up with the curtains, which tore down and fell on top of him. The water sprayed out of the shower, going all over the floor while Jay was struggling to get out from under the shower curtain. "Aargh! I'm stuck!"

" _Sorry about the mirror thing, Jay."_

"Jay? You okay in there?" Nya asked from the hallway.

"I'm fine, Nya! I just slipped!"

"Are you sure?" Nya didn't seem so sure herself. "Because I heard you arguing with someone in there."

Jay managed to get out from under the curtain and sat up. "I was just… singing?"

" _What a lame excuse."_

"That didn't exactly sound like singing."

" _Told you."_

"You know I'm not the best singer, Nya. That's why I do it in the shower!"

"Is that what that screaming was?" Cole asked. "I thought someone was getting murdered in there."

"Let me shower in peace or else _I'll go on and sing an encore!"_

Cole and Nya's footsteps got softer as they went further away from the bathroom.

"That was close."

" _Are you really that bad at singing?"_

Jay managed to get himself off the ground. "Shut up."

" _Seriously, you screamed and fell. How bad are you if they believed you?"_

When Jay was face to face with the mirror again, he found his regular, normal face staring back at him. "Hey, it's me again."

" _Really? Lemme see!"_

His reflection turned into Morro again. "Stop doing that!"

" _I think it's because I'm trying to see what's going on here,"_ Morro said. _"The stupid mirror hates me."_

Jay rolled his eyes. "So do I."

"Jay! We're going to miss breakfast! Hurry up in there!"

That was Kai.

At least this time Jay didn't freak out and get into a fight with the shower curtain. "I'm almost done!"

He slipped again when he stepped out. At least the pipe holding up the curtain broke his fall. There was water everywhere. "Jay? You okay in there?"

"Fine! Fine, fine, fine, fine. I'm fine."

" _I'm sorry, I don't think he heard you."_

"Fine, fine, fine, fine, fine…"

"Jay?" Someone, most likely Kai, tried to open the door, but, as Jay locked it (as was previously mentioned), he couldn't get in. "Jay, you don't sound okay."

"Just need to get dressed, and I'll be right as rain." He couldn't let him find out.

Kai seemed to believe him, but he didn't leave. That left Jay having to make up some ridiculous explanation about what happened in the now flooded bathroom.

He was dressed rather quickly and gave Kai some lame explanation about what happened (he thought he saw something and freaked out) right as he was leaving, promising to fix it when they come back, because Zane was very excited about this date and he made a reservation, despite them not needing to.

" _So I'm coming along?"_

Well, unless he was willing to face the evil ghosts and Nya, Morro _had_ to come along.

" _Oh, fine. But why are you going with them if this is a date between Flameboy and Mr Robot?"_

"Hey, guys? When do you think you'll be ready to tell the others that you two are dating?"

"Not yet," Kai answered as he summoned his Elemental Dragon and flew off.

"We will let you know when we're ready," Zane said as he sparked his dragon.

" _Will it be before or after they've adopted their third secret child?"_ Jay tried to summon his dragon while Morro was ranting on. _"And what about their secret wedding? How will they explain that? "We are throwing a party. There will be a minister and everybody will dress all fancy and then we will kiss after which we will go on a camping trip with our friend, Jay, who will be listening awkwardly while we do team building exercises that he can't join in on from the next room because that will be strange and then we will bring a small child into the temple who won't move out until he is eighteen, or maybe older, and we might bring in other small children… OMG, would you look at that, we're actually married and have been this whole time since that party, and sorry you had to keep it secret for sixty years, Jay, but at least now you can tell everybody when you're in the Ghost Realm, after you're done dying from stress." You don't want that to happen, now do you? You don't want to die from stress because your friends won't tell everybody that they're together now, do you?"_

"Why does my dragon look like that?"

Jay had a good point. His dragon was a sickly greenish-blue colour with wind flowing all around it, little bursts of lightning zapping out every now and then.

" _It's because of me. Same thing happened when I was possessing Lloyd, but on a grander scale, because I wasn't trying to hide from anyone and I was (sigh) being a little drama-queen. This time it's different. Trying to hide, remember?"_

"Well, I can't be seen on that thing. People will get suspicious. I'm walking."

" _All the way to Ninjago City? You'll get tired."_

"When I'm tired," Jay answered, "you walk."

" _You know, I'll be tired too when you're tired."_

Jay kept walking. "I can take a bus. But you better stay quiet. I don't want to look like an escaped mental patient who's talking to himself."

He and Morro argued back and forth until they reached a bus stop. Morro finally agreed to stay quiet, but he broke that promise once they were on the bus.

" _Wow, Ninjago didn't have all these back when I was alive. What's that? Cool! What's that woman doing? No way, that's like those little dolls at your parents' place!"_

Morro wanted to see all the amazing sights on the bus, like the woman playing with an app on her BorgWatch, or the little kid playing with a Fritz Donegan action figure, or the bearded man with a chicken who wound up licking Jay's neck and got slapped in return. Just to be clear, it was the man who licked Jay, not the chicken, and it was Morro who slapped the man, because apparently he likes being licked by strangers just as much as Jay. But now Jay retreated, because he didn't want to be aware of anything until he was off the bus.

Morro was free to ask anybody anything.

"Don't lick my neck," he ordered the chicken-man, who was lying on the ground with a red mark on his face.

" _It's not_ your _neck, Morro. It's_ mine _."_

Morro moved around the bus, trying to get a good seat to see what was going on, annoying both Jay, and all of the other passengers. In the end, Jay decided to take back control of his body and sit down in the back.

" _Come on, Jay. I want to see! There weren't busses around when I was still alive! Whoa, is she wearing pants? Is that normal? Boy, Ninjago sure changed in the past twelve years. WOW!"_ Jay nearly fell out of his seat. _"Are those planes? Wow!"_

This was going to be a long day. At least last time, Morro wasn't trying to force Jay to look at everything he thought were exciting. What exactly was so cool about the man talking on the earpiece? Those were all over Ninjago City. Jay had three back at the temple and one in his pocket. Not that he was about to let Morro get his hands on it. There was no telling what his apparent brother would do with it.

* * *

 **I know Morro is a little out of character here, but he's trying to be friends with Jay while he didn't care what happens to anyone before. Also, be patient, English isn't my first language and this is only my second fanfiction.  
**


	3. Kai and Zane presents: Worst Date Ever

_**Kai & Zane**_

Kai and Zane were pleased to be able to say that their secret relationship was going very well.

Jay was helping keep it a secret, which was a surprise to both Kai and Zane, but apparently he could keep it pretty well for someone who only three weeks ago told the world that Cole dislocated his arm trying to do yoga.

Poor Cole wasn't meant to bend that way, and he was embarrassed when he heard that Jay told everyone.

Either way, they were wrong about Jay telling everyone. In fact, he was very helpful.

Just three weeks ago, Jay told Lloyd that he got Zane to test a new invention of his, which was creaking too much, so he would have to shut it down. That gave Kai enough time to sneak through the window and back to his own room without being noticed.

The next day, Cole asked Jay what the invention was supposed to do, because Lloyd told him that he built something that was creaking the whole night and it didn't work.

It was a good thing that Lloyd bit his tongue right then, because Jay suddenly started overreacting, screaming at an amused Nya to get the First Aid Kit and a defibrillator, which he apparently kept behind the fridge.

Everyone was surprised when she looked, and it was actually there. Kai wanted to ask why they even _had_ one of those, when Lloyd ran and Jay started chasing him.

Later, when they wanted to see the invention, they found a mysterious crate in Zane's room that creaked for hours when they pressed the button.

When Kai asked what happened, Jay told him that he told Lloyd that the invention was something he put in Zane's bed so it would creak, but he told Lloyd that he didn't want Zane to find out so they made a creaking box together, that was, according to him, supposed to be supposed to be something to help Zane sleep.

Lloyd was trying not to giggle the entire time the box was being unveiled, so obviously he believed Jay's story.

But right now, Jay was late for the date, which people would realise it was if he didn't show up, and they couldn't have that, so Kai called Jay.

It rang.

It rang some more.

Ring.

" _You stop that!"_ Jay's voice could be heard. _"What did I tell you about pushing me around?"_

"Jay?" Kai was trying not to laugh. The Blue Ninja sounded so annoyed. "What's going on?"

" _My dragon isn't working, so I had to take the bus. But then I got licked in the neck, so I got off. I'm_ walking _to the city. I would've gone back to the temple, but I'm much closer to the city. One of you are going to have to carry me back."_

"Who's pushing you around?"

" _Some guy I ran into out here."_ The sound of Jay being angry filled the background. Then… _"Sorry, he grabbed my phone and I had to get it back."_

"What happened? Why is Jay late?" Zane demanded by Kai's ears.

"He can't form his dragon, so he's walking here. There's someone with him, but I don't know…"

" _Ah! Hide! Must hide!"_ Someone screamed from Jay's end of the line. _"Ah!"_

" _You can't hide here! I'm here! Get off!"_

"Jay?" Jay screamed on the other end of the phone, something about someone chasing him and now, hiding in a tree. "Jay, are you okay?"

" _Don't hang up!"_

Jay freaked out a little, there was that strange voice again, freaking out, then everything was quiet for a while.

"Jay? We need to know where you are. We're coming to…"

" _No! Stay there! I'm coming to you!"_

Zane grabbed the phone from Kai and put it to his ear. "Jay? Are you okay?"

" _I already told you!_ I'm _hiding here! Ow! Hey! You're going to get me… Ow!"_

"Someone is hurting him!"

Kai didn't need to be told. He could hear Jay freaking out beyond the reach of the phone, and so could the startled waitress. "Should I take your order?" the girl asked, clutching her notebook to her chest. "Or are you leaving?"

" _No! Don't come here! I'll be fine, just… I SAID I'M HIDING HERE!"_

The phone screamed a little, no understandable words being said, then more screams.

"Jay says that we should stay here," Zane told the waitress.

"He sounds like he's in trouble," the waitress whispered.

"I know, but he refuses to tell us where he is."

" _Fine. You can hide with me. But you better stay… quiet! Ow! Stop moving, you idiot!"_

"Jay?!"

The line was quiet for what was an absurdly long amount of time. Something shrieked in the distance. There was some static, then…

" _He's gone! Great! Get out of here!"_ Zane almost dropped his phone at the sudden yelling.

" _Where do I go?"_ The other person asked.

" _Uh… Look, there's a lizard! Maybe_ he _can hide you."_ Some silence, then Jay made a surprised sound. _"I was being sarcastic! What am I supposed to do with a lizard?! Hey! I know you can hear me…"_

The phone clicked off and the waitress sighed in relief. "He's okay."

"I wish we were there so we can help him," Zane stated.

"Don't bring me into this," the waitress joked. "I don't think I can do what you guys do. I'd be too scared."

"If he's not here in thirty minutes, we're going to get him," Kai comforted Zane.

"Okay…" The waitress pulled out a pen. "Are you going to order, or should we wait to see if your friend comes?"

Kai ordered an espresso, with extra caffeine, while Zane asked for an iced tea.

When the waitress was out of earshot, Zane turned his concerns to Kai. "You still cannot sleep?"

Kai nodded, dropping his face into his waiting hands. "I don't know what's wrong with me…"

Zane took Kai's face into his hands. "Well, tell me what's keeping you up at night and I'll try to look through the database and figure out what's wrong."

Kai's face turned pink in Zane's hands, which the nindroid snapped with his built-in camera.

"Zane!"

Zane let go of Kai's face, because his secret boyfriend was getting a little warm and he was getting a little cold, which was his equivalent of a blush, as Kai found out on their first date. "I want to use it as my screensaver."

What Zane meant was that, since he couldn't dream anymore, he would look through any photos he took throughout the day and substitute that with dreams. A pink Kai would make a very nice "dream", Zane decided.

Kai was still pink by the time Zane had the databases open and was ready to listen to him tell him all the reasons he hadn't been sleeping well.

"Ready, Kai?"

Kai turned pinker as he nodded. "Okay. But you better promise not to freak out, okay?"

"What kind of boyfriend would I be if I _did_?"

Their drinks arrived, the espresso downed like a shot in a bar, and then Kai grabbed Zane's tea, which surprised both Zane, and the waitress. "Two more Iced Teas for the gentlemen. Be right back."

Then she was gone again.

"Now, what seems to be keeping you awake at night?" Zane asked.

Kai smirked. "There's no putting this off with you, is there?"

"Not at all."

A sigh. "Okay…" Kai looked around to see if anybody was listening to them. Nobody was, so he started talking, checking every few seconds. "So, you know how I sometimes check up on _(check)_ everybody while they're _(check)_ sleeping _(check-check)_ to make sure they're _(check)_ still alive?"

Zane nodded. He found out when he was visiting in Kai's room and found his little black book, which he keeps under his matrass. He found a bunch of numbers by everybody's names under dates. A person was added and missing by the times they were and weren't there for Kai to check up on them. When Zane asked him what all those numbers meant (Zane didn't have a number by his name, all it said was N/A next to his name), Kai meekly confessed that they were the heartbeats of everybody, which he checked every night while they sleep.

Kai was about to start talking, when suddenly, Jay.

"I'm here!" Jay looked like he got into a fight with the dessert and lost, not walk through it. He dropped a green lizard (it seemed to be glowing) on the table, which caused their waitress to stare at them (Jay and the lizard, not Kai and Zane) as if she'd seen a ghost. "Can I get an ice water please? And keep 'em coming."

The waitress vanished while Jay finished off Zane's Iced Tea.

Zane sighed. "Why did you do that? I was going to drink it."

"I walked through the dessert, was pushed around by some weirdo and was almost killed, I need this more than you." Jay picked up the stunned lizard (which was still on the table) by its midsection and ran over to the (wrong) bathroom, because he "needed to go". Zane wasn't sure that Jay knew that he was in the ladies' room, but a woman with a strange expression walked out.

"Excuse me," she told the manager, "but there is a strange man in the ladies' room holding his head under the water. Do you think you could…?"

Zane ran into the bathroom after Jay with Kai on his heels.

Jay was indeed the strange man the woman was talking about.

He held his head under cold water, coming out every now and then for air, then he dunked his head again.

"Jay, are you alright?" Zane asked. "Did whoever attacked you on your way over here hurt you?"

Jay got his head out from under the tap again. "I'm fine. Right as rain. Need more water… Still thirsty." And back into the water his head went.

A young lady came into the bathroom, shrieked (startling Jay) and ran back out.

"What was she doing in the men's room?" Jay asked between the breaths.

"Actually, it's more like "What are _we_ doing in the ladies' room."" Kai corrected him.

"I don't know about you, but I'm going to puke," Jay snapped back, locking himself up in a stall.

He wasn't lying.

"Perhaps we should leave him in peace?" Zane suggested, reaching for the door.

"No! Don't leave me here alone!" Jay started sobbing.

Zane went to Jay's stall and patted the door to try and comfort Jay, while Kai reached through the slot under the door and patted his feet.

It was indeed a strange sight the manager walked in on, and it was no wonder she backed away ever so slowly.

If one of them were to walk in on a scene like this, they would be doing the same thing.

"There there, it's going to be alright," Zane told Jay, patting the door as gently as possible. "We're here for you."

"We will always be here to hold on to your ankles when you need it," Kai added.

Zane was trying to hug the door when their waitress arrived, trying her best to be useful.

"I'm sorry, but the three of you are causing a scene." She tried to pry Zane off the stall. "And it's against the rules to bring a pet in here." Kai was the victim of an attempted pull, but he was too heavy and all that happened was a missing shoe. "You shouldn't do that."

The waitress knocked on the door. Jay screamed at her. No words. He literally just screamed at her.

"Sir, when you're done in there, I'm afraid I have to ask you three to leave and never step foot in here again."

"I'm throwing up in here, lady!"

"I apologize for our actions, Miss, but our friend is in a lot of distress and didn't know that he was in the wrong bathroom."

Kai grunted in agreement when Zane was done talking.

"Sorry, guys," Jay apologized from the stall. "I didn't mean to ruin your date."

"It's okay, Brother. We can always find another place to eat, and this isn't even such a great place for a date."

"Yeah," Kai grunted from down below. "Just don't get me sick, and we'll stay friends."

The waitress looked like she would rather be anywhere than there when they stared at her. "I don't have anything to say."

"Can I get a mint or something?" Jay sobbed. "I don't want to go home smelling like puke!"

"Could you please bring us a mint?" Zane asked politely.

You had to hand it to Zane, he was always so polite, even when he was told to never return to a place by a nervous waitress who looked like she was expecting to become a murder victim very soon.

She fled, which wasn't a surprise, and the brought back a mint, which _was_ a surprise.

And she ran again.

"I think we startled the waitress," Zane told Kai, who gave Jay the mint.

"Thanks…" Jay got himself out of Kai's grip and stood up, swaying a little, but he managed to keep himself up.

When they went to pay, the manager told them that their drinks were free, as long as they left imidiatly. Zane tried to refuse, but when he looked again, he was outside with his friend and boyfriend on either side of him.

Zane had to let Jay ride with him, because Kai was afraid of catching whatever made Jay so sick.

The way home was filled with the sounds of Kai being afraid of getting sick, Jay being dizzy (Zane had to hold on to him, or he'd fall off) and Zane trying to keep the peace, because Jay was starting to get snappy and Kai _was_ going to snap back. Sickness be dammed.

* * *

 **To the people who wish it were Greenflame, I'm sorry, but in this fanfiction series, Lloyd is, while stuck in a more grown-up body, still mentally a child while Kai is twenty.**

 **Ages (In fanfic):**

 **Kai:20**

 **Zane:21(physically & mentally, reality: 40)**

 **Cole:20**

 **Jay:18**

 **Nya:17**

 **Lloyd:12 (and a half)**

 **Kai is afraid of germs, because when he was little someone in the village died and all he knew was that germs made him die, Now that he's older, he still freaks out whenever somebody get sick, especially Nya and Lloyd, but he freaks out less than he used to.**

 **Headcannon: Jay is a little scared of Kai.**


	4. The Return of Morro: Part 2

**Jay** _ **(and Morro)**_

Morro kept asking Jay annoying questions, but he didn't answer in fear of looking like he lost his mind.

After the third time Jay refused to answer one of Morro's questions, the ghost took matters into his own hands and took over Jay's body.

He leaned over the seat in front of him, where a kid was playing with an app on his phone. "What's that?"

The kid gave him a strange look while Jay let out a string of curses upon discovering that he was stuck in his own head, unable to get out again because of Morro. _"You shit-headed, no-good, idiotic SON OF A_ …"

"It's the Age-app. It shows you how you'll look when you're older," the kid answered condescendingly. "Everybody has one of them on their phones these days."

"Wow." Either Morro didn't catch that the kid was being rude, or he was ignoring that little titbit. "Will it work on me? Zap me with it!"

" _Hey, idiot, you. Can't. Zap. People. with. An. App. On. A. Phone. You're making me look like you: A moron! I'm not going to let you make me look like…"_

Just like Jay did earlier when Morro had so many questions about how much Ninjago has changed in the past ten years, Morro ignored him.

So did the kid.

Jay was now cursing again.

For such a nervous guy, he sure knew some interesting words.

" _Okay, how about this: I have the app on one of my phones. I'll let you play with it when we're back home, but you have to promise to behave and to not push me around again, okay?"_

"Fine."

" _And, I want my body back. Kai and Zane will know something's not right if you show up and ask weird questions."_

"Fine…"

Morro pulled back, and Jay snapped a rubber band which was around his wrist the whole time, but Morro hadn't noticed. The kid in front of them jumped, dropping his phone. Jay picked up the phone and handed it back to him.

"Wait a second!" The kid gasped. "I know you! You were on _Under the Belt_! You're that secret agent who got shot by Bentley! I can't believe it!"

" _What's he talking about?"_

"Hey, I did more than get shit by Bentley, thank-you-very-much." Jay pretended to be grumpy about it, which made the kid giggle.

" _Seriously, what's he talking about?"_

"I think it's so cool that they got one of the ninjas to be on that show! Will one of the others make a cameo?!"

Jay raised his hands a little, turning red from embarrassment. "Thanks, kid. But… About the others appearing… I don't think so. They don't even know I was _on_ that show. Cole watches it when he's got the time, but he didn't get to my first episode on the show yet."

" _You know, our parents and uncle used to be actors."_

The kid swooned a little, then asked for a photo together, with Jay posing like the _very_ British secret agent he used to portray on the show. Then he spoke with the accent for a while, which made the kid giggle.

"Well, if it isn't my old friend _(Sorry, what's your name again?)_ , Daniel, here to help on this _extremely_ dangerous mission of…" Jay looked around before he announced dramatically, "Riding in the bus!"

" _Oh, so_ I'm _the one acting like a crazy person? People are staring."_

The kid laughed, snorting a little, when the bus reached a stop. In the middle of the dessert. Who would get off in the middle of the dessert?

Apparently, someone who wasn't heading to some little village in the jungle.

"Well, I have to get off here. Eat your vegetables, get nine hours of sleep and stay in school, unless you graduated earl, in which case, don't stay in school because people are going to think you're weird. Later."

With that, Jay got off the bus and watched it leave.

" _Hey look! It's Ghoultar!"_ Jay could feel the ghost's excitement about seeing his friend come running in their direction. _"I was afraid they got him, but he's still the same old ghost who overdosed on candy. See?"_

Ghoultar seemed to notice Jay and came running faster, heading right at him. "Whoa! Stop!"

" _Oh no, he's going to…"_

The ghost seemed to run through Jay, but he didn't come out the other end. "Where'd he…" Ow.

" _Hey! This is_ my _hiding spot!"_

" _ **Morro? You say you hide with little brother! Not with ninja!"**_

Jay had no idea what was going on, but right now, he didn't care. His head hurt, he felt like throwing up and he was sure his insides were going to explode. When he looked at his hands, they were starting to turn a sickly green, like Lloyd when Morro possessed him. He couldn't feel his legs anymore.

" _You're going to kill him!"_

" _ **You were suppose to be with little brother! Shoo! Ghoultar hide here!"**_

Now Jay was starting to shake. "I'm going to _die_?!"

" _No! Ghoultar, get out!"_

" _ **Why you not with little brother?!"**_

" _I AM! AND YOU'RE GOING TO KILL HIM!"_

There was silence, and for Jay, everything faded. Ghoultar came out in a green mist, which undyed Jay's skin. It was Morro who stood up, giving Ghoultar a mortified look. "You killed him! I told you to get out, but you didn't, and now he's dead!"

Ghoultar backed away as Morro stepped closer. "No! Little brother not dead! He just get pushed back! Ghosts can't possess dead people!"

"You're lying!" Tears were streaming down his face. "You're lying to protect your own ectoplasm! I hope it rains and…"

Jay's phone started ringing in his pocket, but Morro was too angry with Ghoultar to do anything other than yell at him how he was hoping that he would get drenched in water and never reappear again.

He was so busy, in fact, that he didn't notice that Jay's hand was reaching into his pocket to answer the phone. It dropped into the sand as Morro, still yelling at Ghoultar, picked it up and struggled to figure out how to answer. Ghoultar was amazed to see Morro be so mad, that he was completely and utterly oblivious.

" _It's the green button, moron."_

Ghoultar started laughing behind his hand.

"You stop that!" Morro scolded. He was about to say more, when Jay seemingly woke up.

"What did I tell you about pushing me around?!" He yelled.

" **Jay?"** Whoever was on the other end of the phone sounded like he was trying not to laugh. **"What's going on?"**

It was Kai. Great. No way he could tell _him_ what was going on. Jay groaned out loud. "My dragon isn't working, so I had to take the bus."

Morro pulled Jay back and started talking. "But then I got licked in the neck, so I got off."

" _That's it, you can't play with my phone. LET ME OUT, YOU…!"_ Morro decided to let Jay have control back before he started calling Morro names again.

Thankfully, Jay realised that he was out before he could fling a string of not-nice names into the phone (which Morro would've paid good ghost-money to see the results of). "I'm walking to the city. I would've gone back to the temple, but the city's much closer. One of you are going to have to carry me back."

Ghoultar seemed to be getting nervous. He was staring at something in the sky.

Jay followed his gaze. Kai asked him who was pushing him around. Jay said something about someone he met in the desert.

He dropped the phone when he saw the ghosts heading right for them. It wasn't anyone Jay recognised. Morro forcefully pulled Jay back to yell at Ghoultar again. "You brought them right to us! They're going to kill all three of us!"

" _What?! No!"_

"I should let them take you! I can't believe you brought them here! You almost killed my brother, and now you're going to get him killed anyway! I take back every apology I ever mentally made to you!"

Something flew dangerously low overhead. Ghoultar pushed Morro (in Jay's body) down and did something so they were both unseen.

Morro sank back, giving Jay the chance to get his phone again and make up some lame excuse about the person he met in the dessert having his phone, which Ghoultar was attempting to deny, but Jay shushed him.

"Ah! Hide! Must hide!" Ghoultar freaked. Suddenly he had an idea-look on his face. "Ah!"

He vanished the same way he did before, into Jay. He forced Jay to run, despite feeling like he was drowning and on fire at the same time. Morro took over, pushing Ghoultar out, remembering what happened last time.

"You can't hide here! I'm here!" Ghoultar wrestled to get back in. "Ah! Get off!"

Whatever was swooping around overhead could see them again. Ghoultar _picked him up_ and floated all the way to a nearby tree, where he dropped Morro. "We're in a tree! Why are we hiding in a tree?! He was chasing us back there, and now we're hiding in a tree! Are we monkeys? I don't want to hide in a tree!"

The phone in Jay's hand started speaking. Morro almost forgot it. **"Jay? Jay, are you okay?"**

Morro was about to try and hang up, but Jay yelled at him not to. Like before, Morro didn't realise that Jay pulled him back until the Blue Ninja was back in control.

Ghoultar looked around. "Safe?"

Jay and Morro started pushing and pulling each other around, arguing the whole time, while Ghoultar was rethinking his decision to take over the first random person he ran into in the dessert.

"Stop that!" "No, _you_ stop!" "Stop pulling my hair!" "It's _my_ hair, I can do whatever I want with it!"

In the meantime, Ghoultar was doing his best to try and keep the peace. "Hey! Stop hurting! Stop fighting! He see you and we all get toast! Soul Archer get toast, and now he go away! Toast is bad!"

Jay was held back, which gave Morro the chance to yell at the ghost in front of him. "I'm still mad at you! You almost got my brother killed, and now, all _three_ of us are going to get killed anyway! If he sees us, if he sees _you_ , we're all toast!"

The swooping came closer.

Ghoultar shrieked in a way that could surpass even Bansha and vanished.

" _Don't move. He's here. If you move, you'll strain yourself. Don't say a word."_ Morro was speaking very quietly, while Jay was frozen in fear or pain. He didn't know which. Maybe both.

" **Jay? We need to know where you are. We're coming to…"**

That was Kai. He forgot all about the phone. No, they were coming to… "No! Stay there! I'm coming to you!"

Like before, his skin was turning green. _"Try not to move. If you move too much, you'll die!"_

" **Jay, are you okay?"** Oh no, that was Zane. He sounded so worried.

Ghoultar and Morro started fighting while everything went dark again for Jay.

"I already told you! _I'm_ hiding here!" A burning sensation. Was he melting? "Ow! Hey!"

Ghoultar was expelled very suddenly.

"You're going to get me…" Morro started yelling at the ghost, but there was that sharp pain again. "Ow!"

" **Someone is hurting him!"**

Someone was talking on the other end of the phone, but Morro didn't bother to listen to what they were saying. There was something about ordering?

Morro couldn't let the two ninjas come. They were going to get killed, or get them killed, or kill his possibly dead brother even deader.

"No! Don't come here! I'll be fine, just…" Ghoultar snuck closer. "I SAID I'M HIDING HERE!"

He screamed a bunch of gibberish at Ghoultar, which freaked out the other ghost and maybe freaked out whoever could hear the conversation on the other end. Then he just screamed.

" **Jay says we should stay here,"** Zane could be heard saying. Ghoultar tried getting a closer look at the phone.

There was someone talking in the background while Morro kept backing away from the ghost.

The swooping started up again and now, Ghoultar was coming close again. Morro ran off, finding a good hiding spot by burying himself in the sand.

Ghoultar followed his lead, sinking into the sand.

"Fine. You can hide with me." Ghoultar got ready to speak, but Morro stopped him. "But you better stay quiet!"

Ghoultar shifted next to him. Some of the sand got into his eye.

"Ow! Stop moving, you idiot!"

" **Jay?!"**

The shrieking and the swooping went on for what felt like forever, when all of a sudden, it stopped. Morro rose out of the sand and rubbed away what got in his eye. The ghost that was chasing them was gone.

"He's gone! Great!" Morro unburied Ghoultar with his powers. "Get out of here!"

"Where do I go?"

Morro didn't care. "Uh…" A tiny lizard basking in the sun caught his eye. "Look! There's a lizard! Maybe he can hide you!"

He didn't expect Ghoultar to actually possess the creature, but he did. The lizard came running to him, with the ghost inside it, looking as pleased as a lizard could look. He picked it up and glared at it.

"I was being sarcastic. What am I supposed to do with a lizard?!" The lizard simply licked its eyeballs, making Morro gag. "Hey, I know you can hear me, so you better say something!"

The lizard kept quiet, so it was put in Jay's pocket.

"You know, this is all your fault. If you didn't touch that creepy thing, we wouldn't be in this mess. The Soul Archer wouldn't be a puppet and we would be spending the rest of our afterlives just… farting rainbows and gossiping about the living." Morro used the air to blow the sand out of his face. "It's not like we had better things to do, but I know that _I_ would much rather be talking about how my brother got the lead in the school play than run for my afterlife from a bunch of lunatic ghosts." Morro looked at the guilty face of the Ghoultar-lizard in his pocket. "I can't do the whole puppet thing again, Ghoultar. I can't have her in my head, controlling every single thought I have."

They were in Ninjago city by the time Jay woke up from his rest and sleepily pulled Morro back. "I feel like my head's going to explode." He stumbled into the café where Zane made reservations and found his friends talking at their table.

" _What's that fire guy looking for?"_

Jay ignored Morro and sat down at the table. He was surprised to find a lizard in his pocket and stared at it while Kai and Zane continued to not notice him. He shrugged and slammed it on the table, startling both his friends and a nervous-looking waitress. "I'm here! Can I get an ice water please, and keep them coming."

Then he downed an iced tea that was sitting in front of Zane. He still felt like he was boiling.

He fled to the nearest bathroom after giving Zane some excuse about why he took his iced tea and stuck his head under the sink while somebody left. He didn't get a good look. All he really cared about was cooling off.

He became vaguely aware of someone talking behind him, and then throwing up while someone patted his ankles and someone knocked on the stall door.

* * *

 **Bold: Other end of phone  
**

 _ **Bold & Italics: Ghoultar possessing**_

 _Italics: Whoever isn't in control of the body  
_

* * *

 **Headcannon: The ghosts from the Cursed Realm are usually very nice, but when the Preeminent suddenly appeared or something, all the ghosts became her slaves. Morro stopped caring about becoming the Green Ninja after he died.  
**

 **The ghosts used to check up on their living family members all the time before she arrived and they would tell each other stories about what they were up to in the afterlife. The Preeminent was trying to brainwash Garemdon, Chen and Clouse, which is why they were in those jails. The anacondrai generals managed to keep away from her, which is why they were much nicer than the other ghosts.**

 **Morro would tell everybody who would listen about what his living family members were up to, which is how Ghoultar knows that he has a brother.**


	5. It always starts with homework

_**Lloyd**_

Lloyd didn't understand why Kai was hanging out with Jay and Zane so much these days.

Jay hanging out with Zane? That he could understand. Those two were very close. But why did they have to drag Kai along with them when they went to hang out?

Cole found him in the kitchen, drawing all over his school books (just because he was the Green Ninja didn't mean he didn't have to learn stuff). Usually, Kai would be the one to help him study.

And when he didn't know something, he would go get someone who did.

"Morning, kiddo," Cole greeted. "Why're you all alone?"

"Kai's hanging out with Jay and Zane again." Lloyd groaned. "Why'd they have to drag him with them all the time?"

Cole sat down next to the younger ninja. "I don't know. Now, what's the question?"

"I have to name five of the Elemental Masters who fought in the First Serpentine Wars. I tried contacting some of the guys from the tournament and asking them, but I don't have any of their numbers!" Lloyd dropped his face into the books in front of him. "Do you know?"

"Well, there's Kai and Nya's parents, Ray and…"

"Mom said that's cheating. I can't use them because I met them."

"What about Jay's parents?"

"Isn't Jay adopted? I know I'm only twelve, but I don't think genetics work that way."

Cole rolled his eyes. "I mean, why don't we go sneak around in Jay's room and see if we can find out who they were? After all, he _is_ looking for stuff on his biological family." The Earth Ninja got up and waited for Lloyd to follow.

"You know, if we get caught, Jay's going to be _soo_ mad."

Cole smirked. "He's not here right now. And Nya won't tell on us."

With that, the two of them hurried to Jay's room. Besides, Jay wasn't even that scary.

They didn't find much in his room. They checked his closet (which contained a First Aid Kid, a Second Aid Kit and a Third Aid Kid), his desk and even the box at the foot of his bed. The top drawer by the desk was filled with blueprints, the next drawer was filled with tools and the third drawer contained several devices that were taken apart and apparently, never put back together again.

In the box, there were old Halloween costumes and action figures and a poster which was for a movie series about pirates which nobody living in the temple watched yet. Except maybe Jay, seeing as he had the entire series for some reason and action figures of every character on the poster.

When they checked under the bed, they found a bag with an old sneaker in it and a card that said _**"Dear Losers, did you really think I'd hide it under my bed?"**_

"Oh no! He's onto us!" Lloyd shrieked.

They carefully put everything back the way they were and ran the hell out of there.

"Maybe Uncle has some old pages about the previous Elemental Masters," Lloyd speculated. "It wouldn't hurt to check."

The two ninjas went to Sensei Wu's old room, where they found what they were looking for.

An old book.

Bound in leather.

Titled **"Elemental Masters"**.

They flipped through the pages, finding collected data on some Elemental masters. Not all of them were elements that were at Chen's Island.

There were notes. Apparently some of them were considered to become Ninjas, but either said no, or were deemed unworthy by Wu and never even asked.

 **Shadows: Rejected.**

 **Form: Unworthy.**

 **Poison: Rejected.**

It went on like that for a while.

Suddenly Lloyd gasped. "Look! It's Morro!"

The photo was indeed Morro, or someone who looked like him. Just… Alive. Underneath it, there was a couple of paragraphs about Wu's former student and how he was still looking for him, hoping that he was still alive.

It was interesting, okay?

Wu wrote about how he found Morro looking for food in the trash with other homeless kids when the boy was ten. He discovered that Morro was the son of the previous Master of Air, who was seen as a traitor because he never joined the Elemental Alliance. When Morro's parents died, nobody came to help, so they gave Morro his baby brother (WHAT?!) and told him to run as fast as he could from the killers. The story ended abruptly when Wu mentioned that the younger brother might have inherited the power over wind as well and that he was going to try and recruit him.

"What happened to him?" Lloyd looked up at Cole. "His brother? Maybe he's still alive!"

Cole kept staring at the page after the one where the story about the brother ended mid-sentence. On the next page, Sensei was writing reviews about tea. "Someone ripped a page out." Cole checked the rest of the book. "Someone's ripped _a lot_ of pages out. Nothing about Neuro or why Tox didn't want to become a ninja and some of the pages about some of the other Elemental Masters is missing too. There's nothing about Jay's real parents either, so I guess that's why he didn't find anything when he looked here."

"What about wherever you got _your_ powers? What's your mom's name?"

"My mom didn't have powers, Lloyd. I don't know _where_ they came from."

Now Lloyd had a good excuse for not finishing his schoolwork, right? "Well, I guess I can't do the work right now!"

Maybe Lloyd sounded too cheerful or maybe it was something else, but Cole laughed and told him that he still had to do the rest of the work. Moment-ruiner.

Cole was in the kitchen with him the entire time, helping him where he could.

"I wish Kai were here," Lloyd confessed after they were done. "Not that you're not a good teacher, I just which he was here."

Cole must've wanted to cheer him up, because he suggested baking something.

"NO!"

Not that Lloyd was trying to be mean (Cole looked at him like a kicked puppy), but the last time Cole baked something, it resulted in a chipped tooth, food poisoning and a metallic taste that wouldn't go away for several days.

"Well, what do you want to do then?"

Seeing as they couldn't exactly train with half the team away, Lloyd suggested looking for anything he could find about any family Morro might have. "I need closure," he told Cole when he tried to argue.

"Okay, then." Cole seemed reluctant, but he still allowed himself to be strung along. "Where do we start?"

"Well, Sensei said Morro ran off about twelve years before he recruited you guys, the brother was a baby, which might be anything between new-born and three. Morro was…" Lloyd counted on his fingers. "Morro was nineteen when he died and fifteen when he ran away. If he didn't die, he would've been twenty-seven. Sensei found him when he was ten, so that would mean that his brother can be anything between seventeen and twenty."

Lloyd ran to his room to get his plan-book, where he wrote down all of his ideas and plans. Some of them were good (Cake Tuesday) while some of them were not ( _Everyday Cake_ ) and others were just plain ridiculous (An army of Kittens might be cute, but it will never happen and Misako is allergic).

Cole looked over Lloyd's shoulder and watched as he made his notes.

"You know, if you got this excited about doing your schoolwork, then things would be much simpler."

Lloyd glared at him before turning back to his notes.

A timeline formed. A map of the area around the old dojo was found. They found an old photo of kid-Morro in Sensei's room when they looked again. The photo was on the floor, stuck between some floorboards, and it had a couple of holes in it (It looked like it was burned). Lloyd stuck it in his little book.

"He was such a cute kid," Lloyd cooed. "I wonder what made him turn evil?"

"Your uncle said that he wanted to be the Green Ninja, remember? And when he wasn't, he got mad and tried to prove himself. That's when he ran away, and Sensei never saw him again since."

"We can look through the adoption records for anyone who was adopted during the time Sensei found Morro!"

Cole picked Lloyd up under his arms. "Okay, Kiddo, I think that's a little personal. And maybe illegal. You need to calm down before we get sued."

Lloyd made his pleading puppy-dog face, which works on Kai all the time, but only made Cole laugh. "Oh no, I'm not letting you get me in trouble."

Cole was going to get a very _special_ surprise when he went to bed. Something along the lines of… a dead bird on the pillow.

Fortunately for Cole and unfortunately for Lloyd, he couldn't find any dead birds outside. He did catch a pigeon, but it was so cute, he just let it go and poured soda and sugar all over his bed instead. That'll teach him.

Now it's time to hide.

The safest place would be Kai's room.

Kai's room was a mess a while ago. Clothes were strewn all over the place, fire extinguishers were rolling all over the floor all the time and the bed was always made very clumsily.

Now, everything's changed.

The clothes were all washed and put away, the fire extinguishers were neatly arranged and the bed was expertly made. When in the world did Kai get a night stand? Or was that always there?

There was a little book in the drawer of the night stand, but Lloyd didn't read it, because he respected Kai's privacy.

When he looked in the closet, he found some of Zane's clothes (he knew that because Kai didn't wear the same kind of clothes that Zane did) and a sword.

Why Kai would have any of the nindroid's clothes was a mystery, but he wasn't there to judge.

Lloyd was trying to see if he could fit under the bed (he couldn't) when he heard Cole announcing that the others were back from the city.

Lloyd wiggled himself out from under the bed to hurry up and say hi to Kai, when he heard Nya freaking out, because something happened.

When Lloyd arrived in the kitchen, he found Jay hanging from Zane's arm in a semi-conscious state, looking a little green. Kai looked like Zane was holding a bomb instead of Jay. Cole was busy taking Jay from Zane while Nya was asking the guys what happened over and over again.

"What happened?! Is he okay? Of course he's not okay, he's passed out! Is he sick? Who am I kidding, Kai's freaking out, he obviously _is_. Should I help take him to his room? Kai, let go of me, if it's contagious, we all would've been like that already."

Nya pulled herself away from her brother and started helping Cole with Jay.

"He's going to be okay, right?" Lloyd asked.

"We do not know," Zane answered. "He was attacked on his way to meet with us, and when we met up, he drank all the iced tea and poured water all over his face before he threw up."

"He said his powers aren't working," Kai added. "We had to carry him home."

"What attacked him? Did you see?"

Kai shook his head while Zane ran over to help Cole and Nya, because Jay was clumsily trying to escape them and he appeared to be succeeding. "We weren't there. We thought he was right behind us when we left, but…"

"Maybe whatever attacked him is what made him sick," Nya speculated as Jay escaped and fell down on the floor.

"He said his powers were weird _before_ he was attacked," Zane told her. "He had to take the bus and then he had to get off because someone licked his neck."

Jay mumbled something as Zane picked him up off the ground, then he handed something to Cole which the Earth Ninja didn't get a good look at until after Jay was put in his bed, mumbling something about ghosts and exploding and exploding ghosts.

When Cole _did_ look at what Jay gave him, he jumped back as he threw it at Lloyd.

It was a lizard.

Jay gave Cole a tiny green lizard.

Cole threw a tiny green lizard at Lloyd.

It jumped off and escaped out the window.

How did Jay even catch it, in the state he was in?

Nya came out of Jay's room with Zane, both of them looking worried and talking in hushed tones.

Kai ran over to talk to them, followed by Cole.

Lloyd was left alone in the kitchen.

 _Great._ Just because he was the youngest, he was left out of the loop every time something serious was going on. They thought he couldn't handle it and was trying to protect his feelings all the time.

After Zane sacrificed himself to defeat the Overlord, it took them six months to tell him that the team had broken up. And even then, he found out because he ran into Jay's mom at the grocery store and _she_ told him, asking how he was doing after "that nasty split-up". He didn't want something like that to happen again.

"… and then it ran out the window."

"What's going on? Is Jay going to be okay?" Lloyd asked.

Nobody seemed to know. That, or they didn't want to answer.

Yep.

Being the youngest was frustrating.

He couldn't drive, despite being in a 17-year-old body.

Everybody treated him like a child.

And nobody told him anything.

Frustrating.

* * *

 **Headcannon: Lloyd and Wu both have Albinism (they are supposed to be Japanese, right?) and Garmedon was an unaffected carrier of the gene.  
**

 **Cole isn't afraid of lizards, he was just surprised. Big difference.**


	6. The Return of Morro: Part 3

_**Morro**_

When Jay woke up in the middle of the night, asking for water, Morro had to leave Jay's body to get some.

Besides, there were no other ghosts around other than Yang, and the old ghost isn't really famous for caring about what happens outside his temple unless it's brought inside.

Also, it might help Jay get better faster if he was out.

Unfortunately, Morro didn't know the temple all that well. He had to open and close Jay's door like a living person, which wasn't easy, since he was out of focus, worrying about stuff.

He fell through a wall by accident, suddenly finding himself in Cole's room, which, thankfully, was devoid of the ninja, but that left him wondering where he was sleeping.

Just to stay safe, Morro turned invisible for the rest of his journey to the kitchen, where he was faced with a dilemma.

For one, he didn't know where the glasses were. For another thing, somebody might see a floating glass of water and wonder what was going on. And then there was the little problem of water making him return to the Departed Realm if he were to touch it.

The first problem was solved by him finding the glasses in the cupboard above the sink. The third problem was solved by him finding a pair of oven mitts and using them to open the tab and hold the glass. He put the glass down on the counter and closed the tap, when he hears someone coming down the hall.

He dropped the mitts and turned invisible again, to see Lloyd coming into the kitchen in a half-asleep state.

Lloyd found the glass of water on the counter and the oven-mitts on the floor. He put the mitts away and drank the water. Morro was so mad, he could almost kill the kid.

Who does he think he is, drinking water meant for someone else and putting away the oven-mitts, both which Morro had so much trouble getting his hands on?

And now he was leaving. Good. Now to try again.

Focus. Open the drawer. Remove the oven mitts.

Put them on hands.

The oven mitts went right through Morro when he tried that. Lloyd came back into the kitchen to get a snack or something. He had his head in the fridge, so it was something along those lines.

When Lloyd came back out of the fridge again, with a pudding-cup in his hands, the Green Ninja noticed the oven mitts on the floor again.

He picked them up and looked around suspiciously before he put them back in the drawer.

Seriously, if Lloyd does this again, there will be _three_ ghosts in this temple!

At least he left after he was done eating the pudding-cup, allowing Morro to try again.

He had to do this. The fate of his brother rested in him getting the oven-mitts on his hands and bringing him a glass of water.

As they say, after all, third time's the charm.

"YES!"

"Morro?!"

Okay, so _maybe_ he shouldn't have gotten overexcited and cheered, but as previously mentioned, he was having a lot of trouble getting the cursed things on him.

Now Lloyd was staring at him with shocked green eyes, looking like he was ready to attack.

And to top it all off, Morro dropped the oven mitts again.

"Oh no!"

Lloyd was hyperventilating and shaking and sweating…

All Morro could do was get the cursed glass of water and get the hell out of there before Lloyd alerted Kai, or Cole or (heavens forbid) _Nya_ of his presence.

Hyperventilating and shaking and sweating…

Jay was right. Morro messed him up and he would never be able to make things right…

Morro opened Jay's door and went in to give Jay the water he'd been asking for since he woke up.

"Here you go." Morro had to help Jay drink the water. When the glass was empty, Jay started moaning again.

"I'm still thirsty…"

It was at about that time when Lloyd screamed from the kitchen, waking up everybody else and sending Morro into a panic. "He saw me." Morro grabbed Jay by the face. "Jay, Lloyd saw me while I was out. He saw me and freaked and now he's calling everybody to get me and I can't go back to the Realm of the Departed, that's where all the Ghost Generals are! Please, it took me a great effort to get here, and if I go back, I'll be just like before, and I can't go back to before, not again!"

Jay swayed a little. "Then hide. I'll get some…"Jay plopped down into his bed. "… ow."

Morro was back in Jay's body by the time Kai came into the room with Lloyd.

"Water… please…" Kai could get Jay some water. The Master of Fire could easily fill a glass with water and bring it to the room without vanishing. Just like anyone else in the temple. Except for Yang. But Yang mostly spent his time haunting the attic, out of the way of everyone else.

Kai made the same face he always did (according to Jay) when dealing with germs and got out of the room before you can say "Bomb", which one would think Jay had, judging by the way he left.

It was a disgruntled Cole who came in, holding the glass of water Jay wanted.

"Hey, buddy." Seriously, one would think Jay was dying, the way Cole was talking. He held the water to Jay's mouth (which he choked on a little bit) and was all-around careful. "Okay, can I get you anything else?"

"Water… Please… Still thirsty…"

Cole left, presumably to get another glass of water. Morro was worried. _"I'm so sorry. If I wasn't here, you wouldn't be sick right now. In the one day that I've been here, I freaked out your parents, got you attacked AND made you sick, and I couldn't even get you a glass of water without scaring Lloyd. I get it if you hate me."_

"You're just trying to help," Jay told Morro at the exact time Cole walked in. "It's not your fault. I don't hate you…"

Cole _obviously_ thought Jay was talking to him. "Was I taking too long? If so, sorry."

Jay needed some help drinking the water Cole brought. "Okay."

Morro groaned to himself. _"You'll get better much faster if I'm not here."_

"Where are you going?" Jay asked right as Cole was about to leave. Morro groaned.

"I guess I can stay here for a while. Lloyd poured soda all over my bed anyway."

And now Cole was pulling up a chair to stay the night. Wait, Lloyd poured soda all over Cole's bed? Ha!

"That's not very nice," Jay mumbled.

"We found out that Morro had a brother at some point," Cole told him, "and he wanted to find this guy. Says he needs closure. But now I think it might be a bad idea. He says he saw Morro in the kitchen tonight and freaked out. I guess it was a bad idea to even bring it up."

" _How do they know I even_ have _a brother? I never mentioned you to Lloyd, or in front of Lloyd, or to Ronin or anyone else."_

"Kai and Zane makes such a great couple…" Jay mumbled. "They're so weird, it only makes sense for them to be together."

Cole smirked. "What about me?"

Jay scoffed. "You need two people for a couple, Cole. You're only one person."

"No, I mean, who would be…"

"Sure, you're big enough for two people, but…"

"Hey!"

"… and Zane's had a crush on Kai ever since that incident with the glue gun…"

"You mean when you accidently glued yourself to Zane and Kai had to help you two get unstuck? Not exactly how a romantic relationship gets started, Jay."

"… and Kai had a crush on Zane ever since he saw that "hot ass" for the first time…"

Cole smiled as he tucked Jay in. "You're confused, Jay. Go to sleep."

Morro waited until Cole was out of the room before getting out of Jay.

"Hey, do you have anywhere to…"

"I knew we were related somehow when I first found out that I was adopted," Jay said from the bed after Morro had been searching for a while.

"I figured." Morro stuck his head into Jay's closet, finding some shoes, a First Aid Kid and a taser. "Why do you even have a taser? Aren't you kind of one already?"

Jay shifted in his bed. "It was an impulse buy. And I'm putting it in my phone."

Morro stared at his brother, who was starting to drift off. "You're putting a taser in your phone? Why?"

"Just to see if I can…" Jay yawned. "You know, when I found out I was adopted, I went to Sensei for advice. He told me that you were my brother. He showed me in his book… You know, where he keeps his records on every Elemental Master in Ninjago. I called him a lying old man in a funny hat and yelled at him. The others weren't here. Misako was. She brought me to my room to calm down. Asked her if she knew. She said no. Asked her if she was going to tell the others. She said no. It was for me to decide if they were going to know."

"She's Lloyd's mother, right?"

"She's his mother, his father, his sister and his uncle…"

Morro stared.

"His brother, his aunt, his cousin and his aunt…"

"Jay, I think you're getting a little confused now."

"His sister and his uncle and his mother and his uncle and his grandpa and his…"

"Jay, you want another glass of water?"

"I want a glass of water and milk and juice and fruit and goats and water and water…"

Morro chuckled. "I can get you the water, but I don't think you should have milk right now."

"I want a glass of milk and water and penguins…"

"Okay, buddy. I'm going to get you…"

"I ripped out the pages where Sensei said I was your brother. And then I wanted to burn them, but I couldn't. I didn't burn them. Sensei said sorry. He told me that he won't tell anyone that I stole them and that he would fix his book, just in case. I hid the pages instead."

Morro turned around. "Where'd you hide them?"

Jay giggled. "All over."

"All over the temple? Or all over your room?"

"All over the secret."

"The secret?"

Jay nodded and rolled over.

"What secret?"

"My secret. Hides. Nobody knows. Nobody knows but me." Jay sneezed, then giggled. "And maybe Yang, but he won't tell. He'll never tell…"

Jay started snoring.

Now Morro had the time to search for a good hiding place, just in case of the ninjas suddenly finding him. The closet seemed like a good place. Or under the bed. Or… Someone was moving outside of the window.

When Morro poked his head out, Jay started giggling again.

"All over…"

What was so funny? Morro was hiding for his afterlife, while Jay was perfectly safe. Unless he got caught _with_ Morro.

"Oh no."

If Jay was discovered to be related to Morro in any way, he would be captured, tortured and killed, then his ghost would be turned into a slave, just like the Soul Archer was. Look, he knew he wasn't the best brother so far, but he was trying. He was trying so hard.

Invisible.

Under the bed.

At least until Jay was well enough to help more.

He reached his hand through the matrass and patted Jay's head. "Good night, little brother."

Then he went to sleep.


	7. Cole and the Bad Day

_**Cole**_

"Jay was so freaking delirious last night," Cole told the others over breakfast the next morning. "I'm not even sure he knew what he was saying."

He poked his scrambled eggs a little before taking another bite.

"Morro wasn't in his room, was he?"

That was Lloyd. While they did take him seriously when he said he saw Morro going to Jay's room, the Blue Ninja asked for water (which Cole didn't think would be good for a ghost of there was one possessing him) twice and blabbed on about how he thought Kai and Zane would make a great couple, for some reason.

"No, I checked," Cole told him. While he was mad about having to sleep in the spare room, he couldn't stay mad at Lloyd while he was freaked out like that. "No ghost."

Lloyd didn't touch his food yet. "I _know_ I saw him. I'm not crazy. He was in the kitchen. He dropped the oven mitts and then…"

Lloyd started hyperventilating again, like last night.

Kai comforted him. "Hey, we believe you. Okay? We'll make sure that Morro won't bother you again."

Nya looked up from her breakfast. "Hey, speaking of Jay, did anyone check up on him this morning?"

Nobody spoke.

Cole got up and took the extra plate left for Jay with him. When he went in, he could hear Jay talking to someone.

"… You're the best. You're the best, you know that? The very best. You need a reward. Go down into my stables and take my very best horse. His name is Windjammer. His hair is rainbows and he poops glitter and he's also a dragon but he's also a horse and…"

Cole opened the door and walked in. Jay shrieked at him and weakly threw his phone at him, but the guy was sick, so he couldn't be mad.

"I brought you some breakfast, buddy."

Cole said it in a similar way one would say they brought a sacrifice for a vengeful god. Hey, Jay got really mean sometimes if he was sick. As in, Overlord + Evil Garmedon mean. But that would be if he wasn't delirious out of his freaking mind. Sometimes it was both. Delirious AND mean. No contest about which one Cole would prefer.

"Yay! Food!" Jackpot! "Gimme!" Jay clapped his hands like an excited seal when he saw Cole bring in the food.

Cole had to keep from laughing (because that's one of the ways the mean gets turned on) and sat down next to Jay on a chair that he pulled closer. "Are you okay?"

Jay shifted and tried to grab the plate from Cole. "I'm hungry! Lemme eat!"

"Are you okay?" He _was_ attacked yesterday, after all.

"Don't feed me! He'll laugh!" Jay pointed to something behind Cole, but when he tried to look, Jay shrieked again. "Hey! Don't _look_ at him, look at me! I'm the one who's sick! Sick, sick, sick."

Jay coughed, which worried Cole. "Maybe we should get you to a doctor."

Jay shrieked again. "No! I'm not sick! See?!"

With that, the Blue Ninja tried to get out of bed, to show that he didn't need a doctor, only to fall down on his face.

"Don't take me to the doctor…" Jay moaned. "They'll get him if I'm not here… Can't let them get him… he'll be like before again… Please?"

Cole helped Jay back to bed. "Okay, buddy." Cole hoped that Jay was talking about a hallucination. "But if you're not doing better by tomorrow, I'm making an appointment first thing in the morning."

Cole was about to turn around and leave, but Jay grabbed him by the arm and stopped him. "Did I ever tell you how much I love you?"

Cole patted Jay on the shoulder. "Maybe when you're better, okay?"

"You're the best. You're my favourite. Don't tell anyone. If I die, tell the guys that they'll have to tell. Tell Scales that his son is adorable and I wanna keep him and he can't have him back because he's my son now and I'm setting up a collage fund for him so he can get learned to become a very smart snake-boy."

Cole rolled his eyes. "Jay, I don't think you can do that. Scales won't let you have him and you never have any money to set up anything anyway."

Jay let go of Cole. "Fine, then. Go away. What do you know about stuff anyway?"

"Jay…"

"Give me my food and leave."

Cole gave Jay the plate and left, closing the door behind him.

"You don't have to feed me, I can eat on my own," Jay said from behind the door. When Cole opened the door to see who Jay was talking to, he found the Blue Ninja with a fork in his mouth, staring at the door with wide blue eyes.

There was nobody. Cole was just imagining things.

He closed the door and went back to the kitchen to finish eating.

"So, how's Jay?" Nya asked. "Mean or weird?"

"Weird." Cole took a bite out of his (now cold) bacon. "He talked to himself and said he wanted to keep Scales Junior for himself. Then he cried, because I wanted to take him to the doctor, but somebody would get caught if we take him. If he's not better by tomorrow, we're taking him."

Lloyd still didn't eat anything. "Maybe we can look up what happened to Morro's family."

Zane gently shook his head. "I'm afraid that it would be a bad idea, Lloyd. If you really _did_ see Morro, then that means he might still be in the temple and would be mad if we go messing around in his past. And if you didn't see Morro, then it is still a bad idea because you had nightmares about him lately and it might make things worse."

Kai nodded. "Exactly. Zane and I are going to investigate whatever it was that attacked Jay yesterday." With that, the Master of Fire got up to pack for the investigation. First Aid Kit, food, some camping gear (just in case) and a pair of walkie-talkies.

"If we do not return by nightfall, we expect you to come looking for us." Zane added, leaving to help Kai find some weapons to take with them.

Lloyd asked to go with them, but Kai said that it would be a bad idea, because Jay mentioned something about ghosts, and it might be dangerous.

The kid got mad and decided to lock himself in his room.

Cole _tried_ reasoning with him, but Lloyd just kept yelling at him to go away.

So, instead, Cole went to his room to try and clean his bed. When he got there, however, he found a magazine from thirty years ago sitting on his bed.

On the cover, there was a youthful woman (she probably wasn't so young anymore), with blonde hair, bright blue eyes and a couple of freckles on her nose, wearing a white wedding dress. Next to her, there was a young man with black hair and a proud look on his face. Wait, was that Cliff Gordon?

The headline told him that it was, and that he got married to an actress named Julia, which was, apparently, big news back then. When Cole found the article, he learned that this Julia person starred in some sitcom with Cliff Gordon and that was how they met.

Apparently, the writer of the article thought that it was quite the shame that Cliff Gordon (a major hunk, according to her) had to get married. There was some photos of the actor without a shirt, some photos of him in his show, and some of Julia dressed in a blue dress, sparking lightning, with the headline underneath it warning the ladies that if they didn't stay away, they would find out what happened to the last person who angered her.

"Are you enjoying the book I set out for you?" The familiar voice of Yang asked. When Cole looked, he found the old ghost hovering in front of him. "I hope you don't mind, but I noticed that you and that boy were looking for something like this yesterday. I found this, so maybe…"

"Lloyd _was_ looking for an Elemental Master who fought in the war…"

Yang took the magazine from Cole. "Well, in that case, I'm sorry for not being of any help."

Cole folded his arms. "Yang, what are you talking about? Julia was an Elemental Master, wasn't she?"

"Not all the Elemental Masters fought in the war, remember?"

Cole stared at him. "But you knew what we were looking for. Why bring this?"

Yang vanished into the floor and brought up another magazine, but from three years after the wedding, showing Cliff and Julia smiling and hugging and…

Julia was pregnant.

The headline was very excited, asking if the baby would be the next Master of Lightning.

It also asked if the baby would follow in its parents' footsteps and become an actor or actress.

The article was missing.

No, it was ripped out. Why would someone rip it out?

Yang brought another magazine. A little later the same year, showing the happy couple with a baby, claiming it to be a little boy named Mauricio.

"It's too early for it to be your little friend, isn't it?"

The article was ripped out. Same as before.

"Where'd the pages go?"

Yang shrugged. "I don't know. It's not as if anyone in my temple has a reason for taking the page-" Yang made a fake surprised sound. "Oh, wait! Maybe, just maybe…"

Yang made a gesture towards Jay's room.

Cole closed the magazines and gave them back to the old ghost. "I'm not bothering him. He's sick, and if he wants to keep this a secret, then maybe we should let him."

"I just happen to think that maybe, just maybe, there's a connection between these magazines with their missing pages and… other pages that's gone missing."

Cole stared. "You don't think Jay would've done something like that, do you? It doesn't sound like him."

Yang shrugged. "I can't say. I don't know him as well as you do."

Then Yang vanished.

Mauricio.

Who in the world names their kid that?

Cole got up to go see of Lloyd calmed down.

Along the way, he found Jay sitting in the hallway, drinking a glass of water. "Morning, Cole."

Cole sat down next to him. "How are you doing?"

Jay shrugged. "I managed to get up and get myself a glass of water, so I think I'm doing better."

Okay. Ask him.

"Did you ever hear about some guy named Mauricio?"

Jay went stiff. "Mauricio? Isn't that some guy in who got impaled in some play by some British guy?"

"Yang brought me some old magazines. One of them had some photos of the previous Master of Lightning in them with her husband from thirty years ago."

Jay got very pale and stood up. "He should learn to mind his own business."

"Jay…" Cole hesitated. "Jay, did you tear pages out of Sensei's book?"

Jay went back into his bedroom, which was right in front of them, and mumbled something about Sensei being a "lying old man" before slamming the door shut.

"What was that about?" Nya asked when she came out of the garage (she was busy working on her car).

Lloyd also came out of his room and wanted to know what Jay was so mad about.

Cole stood up. "You know the pages that are missing from Sensei's book?"

Lloyd nodded.

"What pages?" Nya demanded.

"Yesterday we went to Sensei's room to find out who some of the Elemental Masters were who fought in the war," Lloyd explained, "and we looked in his journal. Some of the pages are missing. What about the pages, Cole?"

Cole stared at Jay's door. "I'm not sure, but I think Jay might know something about where they are."

"We should ask him!" Lloyd was about to go into Jay's room, but Cole picked him up and stopped him.

"That's a bad idea. He got mad when I mentioned some old magazines about this couple thirty years ago. We should at least let him calm down."

"GET AWAY FROM MY ROOM!" Jay screamed.

Things were being thrown around inside. Nya was about to open the door, but it was locked from the inside. Some more things were thrown.

Maybe later, when he calmed down, Jay would explain.

For now, however, Cole got Nya and Lloyd away from the hallway and into the living room to watch a movie or something.

At least Jay well enough to get out of bed. At least there was that.

* * *

 **Headcannon: Jay doesn't get sick a lot, but when he does, he's either mean enough to scare the Serpentine back into their tombs, delirious, or all of the above. When he's sick, the others only go into his room to give him something to drink, something to eat, or medicine.**


	8. Jay and the much Worse Day (Sorry Cole)

_**Jay**_

Jay woke up to Morro trying to help him drink a glass of water. "Don't worry. It'll be over soon."

Morro was great. He was an angel. A shimmering, ghostly angel, and he had to know that.

"You're great, you know that? Very great. With pretty hair…" Jay's hand went through Morro's head, which startled the ghost and made Jay sad. "I can't tough you."

Morro smiled sadly. "It's okay. I'm a ghost, remember?"

Now Jay was sadder. That means that nobody could give him hugs. Now he wanted to try and hug the ghost, but his arms went right through him.

"Jay, stop doing that." Morro seemed to think a little, then he looked down at Jay again. "Do you have anything to snack on in your room? For when you're working or something?"

Well, there was _something_. In the bottom drawer of his work-desk, he keeps his secret stash of lunch-bars and raisins which he survived off for a month once when he told everybody that he was going to visit his parents and instead, just locked himself in his room for the whole time, sneaking out to use the bathroom and to shower when everybody was asleep. It was after the fight with Sensei. He couldn't face anyone, even though he knew Sensei didn't tell them. Also, he had the feeling that Sensei knew that he never left, because the old man left a basket of fruit in front of the door a couple of times and Jay took it, because he didn't want to live off raisins forever, which is how long he wanted to stay there.

"Jay?" Morro floated closer. "I asked if you have anything to eat."

"Anything but raisins."

Morro seemed confused. Maybe Jay would have to explain it to him so he would get it.

"After I found out, I locked myself in my room and told everybody that I left and I lived off raisins for a month. I only left my room to go to the bathroom. Lying old man left baskets of fruit in front of my door. He knew I didn't leave, and I didn't want to look petty, so I took them. I'm sick of raisins."

Morro nodded, but he still wanted to find something for Jay to eat.

"I have some Gummy Ninjas in my closet. They're in a box marked **"Reasons"** and I bite the head off the colour I'm mad at. They don't have Gummy Sensei's, so I just threw up when Cole caught me and ruined his shoes. Everybody still thinks I went to my parents'."

Morro vanished into the closet. "Okay, I think I have them. Oh, wait, that's a bag of earplugs."

Morro was being great. Just… so very great. "You know what you are? The best. You're the best, you know that? The very best." Jay needed to reward him. "You need a reward. Go down into my stables and take my best horse. His name is Windjammer. His hair is rainbows and he poops glitter and he's also a dragon but he's also a horse…"

Wait. Something was off. Jay didn't have a horse, did he?

The door opened, revealing Cole coming in with a plate of breakfast. He liked breakfast. Breakfast was good. He liked Cole too, but he wasn't going to eat him, nor was he going to give him his finest horse, because he wasn't sure he even had a horse and besides, he gave it to Morro already.

He shrieked and threw a nearby phone at Cole, who was completely unfazed. Morro popped his head out to see what Jay shrieked at, but vanished again when he saw Cole.

"I brought you breakfast," Cole said gently.

Jay liked breakfast. He didn't like raisins, but breakfast was great. And that meant that he wouldn't have candy for breakfast, which would make him sick all over again, which was also great.

"Yay! Food!" Jay cheered. "Gimme!"

Cole pulled up a chair and sat down next to Jay. "Are you okay?" he asked. Cole sounded so concerned, but Jay didn't eat since… Oh man, when _did_ he eat? That's right! Last night, when Morro fetched him a lump of cheese (poor guy was trying _so_ hard) and a cucumber after everybody went back to bed and he woke up, starving.

He did not have time to listen to Cole's gentle questions.

"I'm hungry!" Jay yelled. "Lemme eat!"

"Are you okay?" Cole asked again. Seriously, once Jay was doing better, he was going to kill Cole in his sleep.

Morro came out of the closet to see if Cole left, and wound up just standing there while Jay was thinking of a good reason for Cole not to stay. Oh no, if Cole was going to feed him…

"Don't feed me!" Jay yelled. "He'll laugh!"

Cole was going to turn around and see Morro, which would be bad. Jay shrieked again, making a sound similar to something being stepped on.

"Hey! Don't _look_ at him! Look at me!" Jay knew somewhere that Cole wasn't supposed to see Morro. And if he looked at Morro, that would lead to him _seeing_ Morro. "I'm the one who's sick! Sick, sick, sick."

In order to convince Cole that he really _was_ sick, Jay pretended to cough. Morro looked worried too. The ghost didn't vanish into the closet again.

"Maybe we should get you to a doctor."

Morro nodded a little behind Cole.

Jay shrieked again, leading to Morro putting his hands over his ears.

"No! I'm not sick!" Jay had to prove to both of them that he wasn't sick, but how? He could get out of bed and show that he was okay! "See?"

Okay, all that happened was Jay falling flat on his face in his blotched attempt to get out of the bed.

"Don't take me to the doctor," Jay moaned. If he was taken away, then Morro wouldn't have anywhere to hide if the bad ghosts were to arrive and look for him. "They'll get him if I'm not here. Can't let them get him. He'll be like before again." There was a shoe under Jay. "Please?"

Cole helped him get back in bed, which was so nice of him. Cole said "Okay, buddy," and then told him that if he wasn't better the next day, he was going to get him to the doctor.

Cole was about to leave, but Morro was still visible.

Jay couldn't let him see him.

He grabbed Cole by the arm and pulled back. "Did I ever tell you how much I love you?"

Cole patted Jay on the shoulder. "Maybe when you're better."

Morro was still not hiding, so Jay was going to have to improvise. "You're the best. You're my favourite. Don't tell anyone. If I die, tell the guys they'll have to tell." The guys he was talking about was Kai and Zane. It was very stressing to have to keep a secret for them so much and lie for them and…

"Tell Scales his son is adorable and I wanna keep him and he can't have him back because he's my son now and I'm setting up a collage-fund for him so he can get learned to become a very smart snake-boy."

Cole looked very serious as he told Jay that he couldn't do that, but he was distracted by Morro hiding in the closet again. He let go of Cole and told him to leave.

"Jay…" Cole started, but Jay wanted him to leave.

"Give me my food and leave."

Cole handed him the breakfast and left without another word, closing the door behind him.

Morro hovered closer. "You don't have to feed me, I can eat on my own," Jay told him as he took a bite of the scrambled eggs.

The door opened, revealing Cole again, who looked around (he didn't see Morro because he turned invisible) and closed the door again when he left.

Morro turned visible again as he spoke. "That was close."

Jay nodded as he continued eating.

"He almost caught me," Morro added.

Jay nodded again.

Morro hovered over to stand in the middle of the bed, in Jay's midsection. "You know, you have to tell your friends at some point. I know they don't like me, but if you could just explain…"

"I wanted to explain yesterday, but then Lloyd had that nightmare, and Kai told him that… thing… and now, I'm worried that they'll get mad at me if I tell them that I brought you here and Lloyd will freak out, because you scared him and he saw you last night or this morning and you scared him again…"

Speaking of which, the youngest ninja could be heard outside the bedroom door, yelling at someone. "Leave me alone!"

Then there was the sound of a door getting slammed.

"Lloyd, it's for your own good," Cole could be heard saying.

"If this was for my own good, then I'd be able to go with them!"

"You know you're still freaked out about ghosts, and you heard Jay." Cole said something else too, but Jay didn't care to listen to him go on. There was some more talking, then Cole leaving.

Morro got out of the way when Jay decided that it was time to go get some water to drink.

"Are you sure you're well enough to walk?" Morro asked.

Jay swayed a little, but he didn't fall down again.

"Should I come?"

Jay nodded. "I don't want you messing around in my stuff. They're private."

Since Morro was the guest, and already helped so much, Jay made the (confused) ghost a sandwich to eat while he drank.

"You know I don't have to eat, right?"

Jay didn't want to answer that. Instead, he downed his third glass of water.

"You know, it's just going to go to waste."

"Cole still ate after he was turned into a ghost."

Morro shrugged. "I know. Ghoultar eats too. And so do a lot of us. But we're ghosts. What's going to happen if we don't eat? Starvation? We're already dead."

"You know, when I found out that I was adopted, the first person I looked up was Cliff Gordon."

"He was our father." Morro poked the sandwich with a ghostly finger. "I think he's dead too."

Jay removed the false back of the cabinet under the sink and brought out a page he tore out of a magazine from eighteen years ago. The main photo was of a blonde woman, Cliff Gordon, a younger version of Morro (about eight or nine) and a tiny pink baby wrapped in a blue blanket, with its hair standing up from static.

The article said that Mauricio (the boy in the photo) had a new baby brother and was extremely happy about it.

"Where'd Morro come from?"

Morro laughed. "It's a funny story, actually. When you just learned to talk, you had trouble saying my name, so you just called me Morro."

Jay put the article back behind the false back. "Oh."

"Well, at first, you'd meow if you wanted my attention, then you called me "Mop", which eventually became Morro."

"How?"

Morro shrugged. "I don't know, you were a tiny baby who just learned to talk. You called everybody "Mop" at the time."

Okay. Jay wanted to go back to his room now.

With a glass of water in his hand, Jay went back to his room, leaving Morro behind to make up his mind about eating.

Instead of going in, though, he sat down in front of the door and finished his water.

A door opened, allowing Cole to escape from it.

"Morning, Cole," Jay greeted. It was closer to noon, but whatever.

Cole sat down next to him, looking bitterly sad and disappointed. "How are you doing?"

"I managed to get up and get myself a glass of water, so I think I'm better," Jay joked.

"Did you ever hear about some guy named Mauricio?"

Jay blurted something about a Shakespeare play where a character of the name got stabbed.

"Yang brought me some old magazines…"

Jay couldn't hear what Cole said next. Something about the previous Master of Lightning? He didn't know.

"He should learn to mind his own business."

He had to leave before he said something he might regret. Yang messed around in his stuff. In _his_ stuff. He brought those magazines with his own money and made sure to hide them, but now the old ghost showed them to Cole and if he found the pages, which Jay hid all around the temple, then they would find out about Morro, and that might end badly.

"Jay, did you rip the pages out of Sensei's book?"

"Sensei was a lying old man."

He was in his room again, the door slammed shut, and an unfamiliar ghost in the room with him.

It looked like one of those ancient samurai warriors Nya liked so much, just…

Scarier.

The ghost had a scroll open and read from it to Jay. "Dear living relative of Morro Gordon. We have some bad news from the Departed Realm. Your brother is a fugitive from the Great Generals of the Third Empire for his hand in destroying our Great Queen. If you see him, you are to alert one of us. Hiding a fugitive from us is punishable by death of the most painful kind and being wiped from the living realm forever. If you bring him to us, we will reward you with the gift of not being killed when the Great Generals take over Ninjago. We know you know where he is. We captured your brother's allies, Bansha, Ghoultar and the Soul Archer. If you do not hand him over to us right this moment, you will share their fate and the fate of all other ghosts who thought themselves quick enough to escape us. And while you may not be a ghost, we can assure you, you will be one a thousand times when we're done with you."

He didn't know what was creepier.

The ghost, or the calm way said ghost was reading from the scroll.

He knew it was a bad idea, but Jay shot a couple of volts at the ghost. The wind went crazy all around him, throwing things off the shelves and at the ghost, including some of the Deepstone he kept in a box on his desk, which actually hurt the ghost.

And the ghost wasn't very happy about it.

"STAY AWAY FROM MY ROOM!" Jay yelled.

It was meant for Morro, but he could hear his friends running from his door.

The ghost came closer.

"Get away from me."

"Deepstone. You're not that stupid after all."

He stepped back as the ghost got closer. "I'm warning you!"

The ghost stuck his hand into Jay's head. "Consider this your first warning, Jason Gordon Walker. Out next meeting will not go as well."

Everything faded into white.

He was in a white room. A screen made static in front of him, before revealing a blurry image. The ghost was _on_ the screen.

"Don't worry. You're not dead. Not yet." The ghost laughed, then vanished into the thin air.

The screen slowly faded to static again.

The screen became black.

Thick white letters formed on the screen.

" **Game Over."**

* * *

 **The story isn't over yet, things are just starting to get fun.  
**

 **Thank you to the people who took the time to write a review, you are very nice (I think). Remember, English isn't my first language, so sorry if my writing is a little strange and the grammar is all wrong. This is my second fanfic, and thank you very much for reading.**


	9. The Coma: Part 1

_**Kai and Zane**_

Zane was very deep in focus.

Scanning for Jay's phone, which was lost in the fight.

Kai had taken over guard duty, and he was ready for a fight.

Zane loved his boyfriend.

With his spiky hair and his honey brown eyes and his overprotective manners and that little half-smile of his…

"I have received the signal," Zane told Kai after fifteen minutes of flight. "It is coming from that tree over there."

It was a good thing that Jay altered his phone to give off a specific frequency in case it was lost. Now, they could easily find it and retrieve the memory card to see what exactly happened yesterday.

"Did I ever tell you how much I love you?" Kai asked when they landed.

A kiss on the cheek.

A kiss on the nose.

A kiss on the lips.

"I believe you tell me at times," Zane teased.

It was true. Kai would remind him of that over and over again, even in front of the others, but they would assume he meant it because Zane helped him with something. Like when Zane helped him make breakfast that morning and Kai told him that he was the light of his life and that he loved him.

Or when Kai sprained his ankle and Zane helped get the swelling down and Kai told him (again) that he loved him.

Not that Zane was innocent in all of that. He was just a little more… discreet.

He hoped.

Nya _might_ have believed them when she caught the pair of them embracing in the laundry room and they told her that Kai had an anxiety attack, which supposedly was the reason Zane was holding him like that.

Jay wasn't really a problem, seeing as he knew right from the start (he caught them sharing their first kiss), but he objected to them dragging him too far into this relationship and threatened to tell _everybody_ if they did.

Cole almost caught them while they were taking a nice, warm, bubbly bath together and enjoying a glass of red wine when he came in to ask if Zane would object to him ordering pizza for dinner. Kai hid under the bubbles the entire time as Zane tried to convince Cole that he had a very long, and stressing week, which was why he was drinking two glasses of wine, which Cole claimed was alcoholism and that he couldn't do it in front of Lloyd, because he would get the wrong idea. Zane just got Cole out of the bathroom, telling him that he didn't want pizza, only for Kai to tell him that it sounded nice when he came up for air.

Zane had more trouble than last time getting Cole to leave, because Cole was worried that Zane might have a glitch and wanted Jay to check him over. Zane managed to convince Cole to leave by telling him that he would go the moment he was finished with his bath. And finished getting dressed, because Jay would not be happy if he didn't do that.

They did have pizza that night, but Jay also diagnosed Zane with rabies and forced him to wear a cone around his neck for a week, which led to Kai putting dye in Jay's shampoo, which turned his hair black and freaked Lloyd out, which freaked Jay out when he found out and led to Jay stapling Kai to his bed that very night while he slept, leading to Cole being the one who had to get him unstuck.

Anyway, back the phone.

They found it under the tree, covered in sand, still on.

It was unharmed.

"Are we going to watch the security feed now, or do you want to analyse it first?" Kai asked, picking up a leafy branch. "I'm curious about what happened to the guy who was with Jay."

Zane scanned the branch. "I've been wondering about that too. I hope he wasn't hurt. The branch appears to have been broken off roughly five hours ago, which is too late for it to have been broke off during the attack. But it contains a strange energy."

Kai studied the branch. "There's something carved here, see?"

The branch was handed to Zane, who studied the carving, which was that of some kind of flower he did not recognise in his database, followed by writing in a language which he did not recognise either. "I do not understand what is written here. This language isn't in any of my databases and neither is the flower."

"Maybe Misako can interpret for us," Kai mused.

Zane nodded and brought out his phone to call Misako, when it started ringing.

It was Cole, not Misako.

If it _was_ her, it would've just been plain spooky.

"Hello, Cole. We have just found some very interesting…"

" _I don't care! It's about Jay! And Morro too, I guess, but it's mostly about Jay!"_

Cole didn't often speak on that level of panic. And Morro was involved? "What is it? Is Jay okay? And what's the thing about Morro?"

" _I don't know! Apparently he's been here since Jay came home from his parents' and someone's after him and we were just watching movies when Yang appeared in the living room, said he had something to show us, but we have to stay calm and not attack and he took us to Jay's room and Morro was there, freaking out, and Jay was on the floor, his room was a mess, and everything was everywhere, and he wasn't moving and Morro was freaking out and said he didn't do anything and Jay's eyes are glowing, and they're creeping Lloyd out, so we put a sleep mask on him so they'll stop, but Morro's still here and he keeps saying that we should take it off so Jay can see what's going on, but Lloyd's all freaked and Nya wants to kill Morro, but Lloyd's holding her back and we don't know what to do…"_

Kai, realising that it would take some time for Cole to finish talking, was on the phone asking Misako to come and see the branch they found and maybe translate what was written on it.

"Cole, Cole, calm down," Zane tried to reason, "we're coming home right this instant."

" _He keeps staring at me!"_ Cole could be heard crying over the phone, and Lloyd could be heard having a panic attack in the background. _"Morro took off the mask, and now Jay keeps staring at me! Lloyd! Stop shaking him! It didn't work before, and it's not going to work now! I know, but… Here, talk to Zane!"_

There was the sound of the phone being handed to someone else, and some minor arguing in the background.

" _Zane! Jay's dead!"_ Lloyd sounded close to tears. _"We just were watching a movie, and now he's dead!"_

" _He's not dead!"_ Nya protested in the background.

"Lloyd, take deep breaths. Kai and I will be home shortly to see what can be done." Zane refused to believe that Jay was dead. He was pretty sick, if what Cole said that morning was to be believed, but not dead. Please, anything but dead.

" _Morro's here and he keeps uncovering Jay's eyes because he thinks he can see what's going on and we tried everything, but Jay's still dead! All he does is stare!"_

Kai was done speaking to Misako, so Zane handed Kai the phone, telling him that Lloyd needed him.

In the meantime, Zane was trying to summon his dragon, but he was too freaked to get anything other than a couple of sparks of ice. Lloyd's claims of Jay being dead really got to him.

Behind him, Kai was doing his best to calm Lloyd down. "Remember your breathing exercises, Lloyd? Breathe in, breathe out. Good job. What makes you think he's dead? Check his pulse for me, okay? How do you… Okay, this is very important, Lloyd. Pretend that Jay is made of glass when you put your hand to his chest. Because, you have super-strength and you know you have trouble controlling it when you're panicked. You'll accidently crush him. Now, the important thing to remember while you're checking him is that his Elemental Defence Mechanism will… I know, Lloyd. I was trying to warn you. But it means that he's still alive, okay? Lloyd… You didn't accidently crush him, did you? Good. Okay. Zane and I will be over there as soon as possible."

Zane turned around to grab Kai by the shoulders. "What happened? Did Lloyd accidently crush Jay?"

Kai shook his head as he turned the phone off again. "No, Jay's fine." Kai paused to reconsider his words. "Jay's not crushed. He's just unconscious and staring."

Zane tried sparking his dragon again. "I wonder if it is part of the reason his powers weren't working yesterday." This time it worked. "We should hurry."

Kai sparked his dragon with relative ease and hurried back home.

Zane flew after him.

All the way back to the temple, where they saw the reason their usually calm friend freaked out and the reason the youngest of their group was close to tears.

In the dining hall, on the table, was Jay, lying down with his eyes wide open and glowing blue. Cole was doing his best to help Nya calm down and to get Lloyd to stop shaking Jay while Morro, the Master of Wind, and an unfriendly ghost, was floating all over the place, trying to help Cole as much as he could while avoiding Nya and Lloyd like the plague. It was him who first noticed Kai and Zane when they came in.

"Hey! You two! Kai and Zane! Welcome home!" He moved over from where he was busy making sandwiches, greeted them, and went to chase away Yang when he noticed the older ghost heading over to try and sneak a taste.

Clearly things were far more interesting back in the temple than out in the desert.

"What happened here?" Kai asked, running over to help calm down Lloyd as he spoke. "Lloyd, you have to stop shaking him! What happened here? We were only gone for an hour, how did this happen?!"

In the meantime, Zane had to try and get Nya to stop chasing Morro, the only one who had any idea what was going on with Jay.

Morro didn't seem to care that he was being chased. He was too busy guarding the food he was still busy making from Yang.

"Nya, you have to calm down before you do something you might regret! Morro is the only one who knows anything about Jay's condition!" Zane called after the girl, running after her as she ran after Morro as he ran after Yang, who was now chasing Zane to complete the circle. "Stop chasing me!"

Kai abandoned Lloyd to start chasing Yang for chasing Zane. "Stop chasing him!"

As the chaos progressed, what was previously on the table was now on the floor, tripping Nya, Zane and Cole, who joined in on the chasing in order to stop the chasing, and they were the ones who tripped Kai, who was the one who tripped Lloyd, who was, just like Cole, trying to calm everyone down.

Morro was scolding them for causing Jay to fall to the ground while Misako watched helplessly from the door.

The branch Kai and Zane brought home were the least of her worries.

Nobody even noticed her arriving.

"Of all the things we should be worried about… Skeleton Warriors, Stone Armies, Serpentine… The most worrying thing would be that its heroes literally just tripped over themselves so badly, they didn't even notice that someone was at their door."

Morro grabbed the plate he'd been guarding and offered Misako a sandwich. She politely declined and instead, watched as he put Jay back on the table.

"What exactly happened here?" Misako helped her son get up off the ground. "Did Kai call me because of this, or was it because of something else?"

Cole stood up off the ground, startling Zane, who rolled off him and was caught by Kai.

"Actually, we called you because we found something interesting on a branch and we thought you might know what it is," Zane told her. "I couldn't find anything like it in my database and we hope you can translate it for us."

Zane had to show her the branch while Cole went back to trying to keep Nya from hurting Morro and trying to keep Lloyd from shaking Jay.

"I told you, shaking's just going to make things worse!"

Kai pried Jay from Lloyd behind them.

"The writing looks like it comes from the late Douai era," Misako commented. "It was the third great empire of Ninjago and it was ruled by the Hayashi family until they were disposed of by what is described as an army of demons, with claws as long as swords and wicked red faces, painted with the blood of the Douai people."

"Can you read it?" Zane asked.

"I think it says… **"Hand over what is ours or undoing is yours"**. The flower looks like a Fire Lotus, which was the symbol of a clan of samurai who used to serve the Hayashi when they were still in power. Today, that clan has been split into many different orders of samurai, ninjas, and even cults, if rumours are to be believed." Misako put the branch down. "If I were you, I'd stay away from all of them. These people are known to kill."

Something fell and Morro started crying. "This is the fourth time!" When they looked around, it was revealed to be Jay who'd fallen off the table again.

"What is Morro's concern with Jay?" Zane asked.

"I'm sorry, Zane. It's really not my place to tell," Misako told him.

A strangled sob came from Cole's throat. "He keeps staring at me!"

"We're not covering his face again!" Morro argued. "He wants to see!"

"How do you even know that he can?!" Cole countered. "He's not doing _anything_!"

"I don't _know_!"

Cole shuddered. "Well, I'm not letting him look at me like that! It's creepy, it's wrong and I'm going to have nightmares if he keeps it up!"

Morro put his hands over Jay's ears. "Don't you talk about him like that! He can hear you!"

"No, he can't!" Cole retorted. "Look at him! He doesn't even _look_ right anymore…"

Morro grumbled something about Cole needing to get his head out of somewhere and sank into the floorboards.

Jay was dropped again, much to the dismay of Nya, who agreed with Morro on that one, single, subject. Jay should not be dropped so many times.

Cole put a sleep mask on Jay's face before carrying him to the medical room.

When he came back, Cole told Kai, Zane and Misako what happened.

* * *

 **Tune in next time to read what happened with Cole, Lloyd, Nya and Morro.  
**


	10. The Coma: Part 2

_**Cole**_

They were watching a movie about a band of pirates fighting another band of pirates for treasure abandoned by another band of pirates. It was really dumb movie.

Thankfully, Yang interrupted them in the middle of it.

Or not.

"Promise not to attack, and I'll show you something I can bet you've never seen before."

Cole, Lloyd and Nya all promised, so the old ghost led them to Jay's room.

Did Jay manage to drag _Yang_ , of all people, into one of his little pranks? Cole sighed. "Yang, you know you don't have to help Jay if you don't want to, right?"

Yang folded his arms. "Okay, wise guy, tell me what you think is on the other side of the door."

"If this is one of Jay's little pranks, there's going to be a corpse," Nya told him.

"Ding-ding-ding!" Yang pointed at Nya like some kind of game show host. "We have a winner!" Yang opened the door, revealing Jay face-down on the floor, all limp, with Morro (!) desperately trying to wake him up. "There's a dead body in the room!"

Morro shot a gust of wind at the old ghost. "No there's not! He's still alive!"

Yang put his hands on his hips. "Well, excuse me for making things more exciting around here."

Nya pointed her hand at Morro. "I swear, if you hurt him…"

Morro raised his hands in surrender. "I swear, I would _never_ …"

"So, if he's not dead, then what exactly _is_ he?" Yang asked, hovering closer to Jay. Morro waved his hand through him.

"I don't know, but he's not dead." Morro turned Jay around, revealing a pair of blank, glowing blue eyes paired with a blank, emotionless face, just staring at nothing. "See? A corpse won't do that."

Cole shuddered. "What's _wrong_ with him?"

"Beats me. He just yelled to stay away, made a mess, and five minutes later, he was on the floor, not doing _anything_." Morro made a motion to pick Jay up, but his hands went right through. "I swear, I didn't do this to him. It was one of the ghosts after me. Somehow, they knew I was here and attacked…"

Lloyd was hyperventilating in the hallway.

Nya went out to try and calm him down while Cole had to (very gently) pick up his friend and carry him to the dining hall, where he was put down on the table.

It was creepy, the way Jay's eyes watched him.

Dead.

Unfeeling.

There wasn't even a _twitch_.

He had to do something about that…

In a box, in the garage, there was a bright pink sleep mask Dareth would wear when he stayed in the temple for a time. Dareth wouldn't mind if he used it to cover Jay's face, right? Besides, the Brown Ninja wasn't even there.

It took him a while, but he found the sleep mask.

When he was back in the kitchen, he thought for a moment that Jay woke up, but it turned out to be Morro who was moving him to make him more comfortable.

The ghost gave him the most evil glare possible when he saw what Cole was doing. "Don't do that. He wants to see."

"No he doesn't! He's doesn't want _anything_! Look at him!" Cole put on the sleep mask, receiving a couple of light shocks for his efforts (but that was to be expected) and could finally breathe when Jay wasn't staring at him anymore.

Morro angrily removed the mask. "He wants to _see_!"

Cole tried to get the mask back from Morro, but he vanished into the floor, taking the mask with him. "Come back with that! I don't want him staring at me like that!"

Lloyd came into the kitchen to find Cole screaming at the floor like a panicked loon. "What's going on?"

"Jay's eyes are creepy like that, so I tried covering them up, but then Morro came and uncovered them and went into the floor."

Lloyd looked over at the table, where Jay was lying, just…

Staring…

"He's dead."

Cole grabbed Lloyd by the shoulders, firm, but gentle. "He's not dead, he's just…" Cole wasn't sure what he was. "Not dead…"

Nya came running in from the hallway. "What happened?! He's okay, right?!"

Cole had to run over to calm Nya down. "He's okay, Nya. He's okay, okay?"

Lloyd started shaking Jay. "Jay! Wake up!"

He wasn't really being gentle, but nothing happened.

"Lloyd! You have super-strength! You'll make things worse!" Cole ran over to get Lloyd off Jay as he said that. "Let him go!"

"His eyes are creepy…" Lloyd whispered.

Cole grabbed the next best thing to cover Jay's face, which was a tablecloth.

It covered Jay entirely, which made Nya start crying.

"He's not a corpse and this isn't a morgue! Take that off!"

The tablecloth was pulled off and Jay was thrown off the table, much to the annoyance of Morro, who just came back in and started screaming at them for dropping him.

Lloyd was shaking Jay again and Nya started threatening Morro, demanding that he explain.

"I'm a fugitive from some bad ghosts and I was here since he came back from his parents!" Morro yelled, pointing at Jay to explain the "he" he was talking about. "He knew! I asked him to help and he did! And now, one of them got their hands on him and now he's like _that_!"

Nya lunged at him.

Lloyd caught her and held her back, giving the ghost a chance to escape, which he used to pick Jay up and put him back on the table instead of fleeing.

"Guys, I'm calling Zane," Cole told them. If anybody knew what to do, it would be him.

Morro nodded as he tried to rearrange Jay to be more comfortable. "He's the robot, right? He'll know what to do about this…"

Lloyd was still trying to hold Nya back by the time Cole found his phone and called Zane.

" _Hello, Cole. We have just found something interesting."_

Cole didn't have the time for this. "I don't care! It's about Jay!" Morro seemed to be important in all of this too. "And Morro too, I guess, but mostly Jay!"

" _What is it?"_ Zane sounded very concerned. _"Is Jay okay? And what's the thing about Morro?"_

"I don't know! Apparently he's been here since Jay came home from his parents' and someone's after him and we were just watching movies when Yang appeared in the living room, said he had something to show us…"

Cole knew he was ranting, but what else could he do?

Lloyd was shaking Jay again. Nya was sobbing on the floor. Morro looked like he'd rather be anywhere else at the moment. Cole was in a mixed state of all three.

Yang didn't seem too worried about what was happening.

"Lloyd! Stop shaking him! It didn't work before, and it's not going to work now!"

"He's dead!" Lloyd cried. "He's dead, he's dead, he's dead!"

Cole didn't want to think about it, but he couldn't calm Lloyd down very well either. "I know, but…" Cole shoved his phone to Lloyd. "Here. Talk to Zane."

Lloyd wasted no time in telling Zane that Jay was dead.

Nya wasted no time in protesting.

And Morro, the source of all the drama, was on the floor, picking up things that were tossed around while Cole was on the phone.

Why was Morro, of all people, so concerned with Jay?

Wait.

Apparently, Jay had an older brother (who he didn't want to talk about) and Morro had a younger brother who was between seventeen and twenty.

Jay was between seventeen and twenty.

And if Morro didn't die, he would've been twenty-seven, which is the right age for the baby in the magazine.

Did Jay know? Did Morro know? Judging by Jay's reaction earlier, before, it would seem that Jay did, in fact, know.

Was that why Jay helped Morro hide for two days, even though they were enemies?

But it wouldn't explain why Jay didn't tell the others.

Lloyd was hyperventilating because Morro absentmindedly went through him, as if he wasn't even there, to pick up a spoon.

Nevermind. Cole could see why Jay didn't tell anyone.

And since he was his friend, Cole wouldn't tell anyone either. That was up to Jay.

Well, not Cole knew why exactly Jay was so furious when Kai messed with his shampoo and dyed his hair black for a week. And the "lying old man" thing made sense too, if Sensei knew.

Who was he kidding, Sensei would definitely know. He knew everything, and in his book, Sensei said he knew. Or something like that.

That's why Jay tore out the pages.

Speaking of Jay, Lloyd was checking his pulse and crying at the same time.

Morro started making sandwiches, which is pretty hard to do if you're a ghost, Cole remembered. Everything was hard if you couldn't touch anything without an incredible amount of focus.

Nya was getting ready to attack the ghost again, leading to Cole having to hold her back and get her to calm down before she does something she might regret.

"Kai and Zane are on their way," Lloyd announced. He was poking around Jay again. "Are you sure he's not dead?"

The piece of cheese Morro was working with fell through his hands behind the Green Ninja. "He's not dead. You felt his heartbeat. Dead people don't have those."

Okay. Now that Cole saw it, he couldn't _unsee_ it. Morro and Jay had the same light spray of freckles on their faces and their eyes were of a similar shape. He couldn't be sure if their eyes were the same colour, because Morro was covered in the same sickly green shade which all ghosts were covered with and Jay was still doing his impression of the world's creepiest lamp, but he was willing to bet that if Morro was still alive, then their eyes would be the same colour.

By the time Kai and Zane came in, everything had escalated.

Jay fell down two more times (once when Lloyd was freaking out again and once when Morro was being chased by Nya).

Unfortunately, nobody knew what to do next.

* * *

 **Don't worry, Jay isn't dead.  
**


	11. A Peek Into The Past: Part 1

_**Jay (One Year Ago)**_

He sat down on the floor of his bedroom, looking through the old magazines and newspapers he brought from several people over the internet over the past two weeks. Photos were spread out around him as well.

A blonde woman he knew now to be Julia Libber was on many of these photos.

He knew it would seem weird if one of the others were to walk in on him, doing his studying of the previous Master of Lightning, but he needed answers.

The woman had a kind smile which made him wish he knew her, but he also knew if he did, he wouldn't know the people he knew as his parents for so many years.

A photo of himself was sitting next to the photo of her. His _mother_.

He could see some resemblance. Who was he kidding, if Jay was a girl, he'd look like a gingerier version of her. If he _was_ a girl, would he and Nya still be dating, or would it just be weird?

"Jay, you've been in your room all day. Are you okay?" Did she sense that he was thinking about her? Good thing the door was closed and she didn't come in, because then there would be some things to explain.

"Would you still date me if I was a girl?" Okay, that was _not_ the question he wanted to ask her.

Nya sounded taken aback when she answered. "I don't know. Would _you_ still date _me_ if I were a guy?"

Jay opened the newspaper he was looking through at an article about the Serpentine War, where they mentioned that Julia Libber and some other Elemental Masters he never heard of were _not_ going to fight in the war, which was leading to major outbursts in Ninjago. "I don't know, Nya. Would _you_?"

"Sure, I'd date me if I were a guy," Nya joked. "Seriously, though. That exactly are you doing?"

"I'm doing some research on the last Master of Lightning." Jay hesitated. "I told you how I just found out that I was adopted, right? Apparently, it was my biological mom."

Nya was quiet on the other side of the door.

"My parents are great and all that, but why didn't she want me? This woman's supposed to be my mom…"

Was it just him, or was there a slight breeze in the room?

"Jay, you know we're right here for you if you want to talk, right?"

That was Kai.

Kai was right. While the guys may make fun of him sometimes for his little freak-outs, they will also be there if he needs them. That's what being a brother is all about, after all.

"Thanks, Kai."

Jay found an article in the newspaper he was reading about how the Master of Wind had decided not to join the Elemental Alliance because he had a feeling that there was something wrong with the sudden war against the Serpentine just starting for no reason.

 **The Elemental Master of Wind had decided not to join the Elemental Alliance due to personal reasons. He left the courtroom, calling the other Elemental Masters a bunch of "stuck up snobs", among other things. His fiancée of the past two years had to deal with a room full of angry masters for the rest of the day, attempting to keep the peace. In the end, she left the EA as well, claiming that she wouldn't stay and listen to a bunch of "self-righteous bastards who refuse to listen to reason" and that neither she, nor the Master of Wind, will fight in the war.**

 **This has branded them as traitors, for not only did they refuse to fight, but they also managed to convince several other Elemental Masters not to fight, including the Master of Lava, the Master of Gem and the Master of Memory. Rumours have it that the Masters of Ice and Earth are considering leaving as well.**

 **Is it possible that the Elemental Alliance will break apart? If so, Ninjago will have to face the fact that she will be destroyed in the forthcoming war against the Serpentine.**

There were many similar articles in all of the newspapers from that year.

In all of them.

Then, by accident, he stumbled upon an old Ninjago Affairs magazine with a photo of Julia Libber and Cliff Gordon, a favourite actor of his parents (hey, that's why they gave him the middle name of "Gordon"), standing side by side, on the cover.

 **Master of Lightning and Master of Wind engaged to be married!**

The date was set two years before the date in the newspaper about the EA possibly breaking up.

If the Master of Lightning before him and the Master of Wind before Morro were married, then what were the chances of him being related to the ghost who possessed his young friend, messed up everybody and nearly turned all of Ninjago into a ghost town?

"Please tell me she cheated on him or something," Jay whispered to himself. "At least with me…"

But he couldn't find anything to prove that the relationship went wrong.

In fact, the two of them were great together and never seemed to fight over _anything_. The only time they _did_ fight, was when Julia ran over to help the EA with something they needed her help for only three hours into their marriage (apparently she showed up in her wedding dress and had change out of it at the dojo, where she gave it to Kai and Nya's mom, who wanted it for _her_ upcoming wedding, and fought whatever they were fighting all covered in wedding-glitter and with her hair still full of pretty hairpins), but nothing to warrant a divorce, seeing as she wanted to help her friend, the previous Master of Ice, who was the one who called her for help.

None of the others were too happy to see her there, except for the Master of Ice of the time (and _maybe_ the Master of Water, who got a free wedding dress out of it). She wasn't very happy either, because she wanted to go on her honeymoon on some island.

In fact, over the next three years, they became big TV celebrities and then, they had a baby they named Mauricio who the people were wondering about if he was going to be the Master of Lighting, or the Master of Wind.

Apparently, everybody was so very excited about this baby.

A few years along the road, when the kid was about eight, an article ranted on about how this kid was going to have a baby brother or sister, and they were wondering if this one would be the next Master of Lightning, because they knew that Mauricio already had the Element of Wind.

The breeze in the room got stronger and stronger, sending everything all over everywhere.

He had to close the window.

Unfortunately, there was no window to be closed.

Not that either one of his two windows went missing or anything, but apparently both of them were tightly shut.

They were never open in the first place.

No.

He had to talk to Sensei.

Sensei would know what's going on.

The newspapers and magazines and old photos were quickly stored away in a drawer.

His legs carried him into the door as fast as they could carry him.

The door was still locked, so he didn't leave the room. Instead, he got a giant bruise forming on his knee because of how hard he ran into the thick, hard, incredibly hard, hardwood door (They're all ironwood).

Apparently, he couldn't go through walls and closed doors like ghosts could.

He had to go the long way, with a key and the opening of the door.

And the worrying of the Cole.

"Jay, are you okay?"

The former ghost helped Jay up off the ground, because that's where he fell when he left his room.

"I'm fine," Jay answered. "Just ran into my door."

Cole chuckled. "You'd expect it to be _me_ who runs into things, not you."

Right. Cole was still trying to get used to being a living, breathing person again.

He was still extremely nervous around water, he walked into a lot of stuff, including doors, walls and people (he forgot that he couldn't go through them anymore) and there was that one time when he ran into the temple wall trying to get out of the rain, giving himself a concussion in the process.

"Did you see Sensei anywhere? I have to ask him something." Jay discovered that the shirt he was wearing didn't have overly long sleeves, like those he's been wearing since the Nadakhan incident, so he pulled on the sleeve in order to better hide what was under it. "It's pretty urgent."

Cole grimaced. "Sorry, he just left to run some errands."

Jay abandoned his fidgeting with his sleeve and sighed. "Okay."

Maybe he sounded a little too disappointed or something, but Cole took Jay firmly by the shoulders and looked him in the eye. "Jay, you know we're here for you, right? You can talk to us."

Yes, Cole would think that, but Jay wasn't so sure.

He kept trying to convince himself that the whole incident with Nadakhan was just a dream, but he was back with Nya, which was pretty much solid proof that it wasn't a dream.

He tried waking himself up so many times, but it never worked.

For instance, he'd poke his head in ice-cold water to see if it would wake him up.

He also banged his head against the table in the dining hall, but he had to stop because it would wake the others and make them worry about the weird noises, because Jay refused to tell them what it was (him) and banging his head against a table apparently hurts.

Somehow, everyone was more concerned about the noises _stopping_ when he finally gave up.

Cole didn't let go of Jay just yet.

"We're here, okay?"

Jay nodded. "Okay. Thanks."

Cole had to let go of Jay eventually, because Jay didn't want to be held much longer and he started complaining that he wanted to go to the bathroom.

He didn't really have to go, but he did want to leave.

He went outside.

He needed some air.

Some nice, fresh, outside air.

And to lie down.

Jay had to lie down.

The grass was soft.

Nice, soft, fluffy-from-the-last-mow grass that nice. He would have some explaining to do when he went back in, covered in grass and grass stains, but _oh wow!_ The grass was _soo_ soft.

"Jay, are you okay?" Lloyd asked. The Green Ninja was outside, raking the grass, because he mowed it that morning and he didn't have the time to do it earlier, because there was a robbery and he was called in (Kai went with him, because of the whole mess with Morro) and Jay didn't know it until the very moment he saw Lloyd holding the rake, because he was too relaxed.

"I'm great. Just great." Jay picked up a handful of damp grass and watched a light breeze blow it away. He was still lying down. "I'm doing great. Great, great, great."

The wind blew the grass into Lloyd's face.

"Ew! Grass in my mouth! Grass in my mouth!" Lloyd ran inside, calling for Kai, because apparently grass in his mouth was a medical emergency. He was _eleven_. Jay was sure that the young ninja ate far weirder things than _grass_. But Jay didn't want to judge.

Now, where was he?

Ah yes, grass. Nice, soft grass which didn't judge anyone and didn't make fun of him behind his back when he was having a freak-out. If he could, he'd stay there forever. But a pair of bamboo sandals in front of him got in the way of his plans for the rest of forever. "Jay, Cole said you wanted to ask me about something? He said you said it was urgent."

Sensei was back.

"Hi, Sensei. I'd get up, but the grass is so _nice and soft and comfortable and…_ "

The old man chuckled. "I see. So, how urgent is this question you wanted to ask me?"

Jay sat up, sending grass flying all over the place and looked around to see Lloyd doing his chores again, now that Kai managed to convince him that he wasn't going to die from grass in his mouth, and Kai was helping him.

"It's not that urgent, Sensei. It can wait."

The old man scratched his beard when he saw where Jay was looking. "I see. It's urgent, but you don't want to share it with your brothers."

Jay fell back down. "I don't think I _can_ share this with them. At least, not yet."

Sensei nodded. "I understand. Brothers don't always share everything. I should know."

With that, the old man went back into the temple, leaving Jay alone to argue with Kai and Lloyd about whether he should move or not move.

That was the question.

But what was the answer?

The answer was no. He wasn't going to move just yet, and he could always tell Sensei what he discovered later. When there was nobody around to eavesdrop on their conversation.

* * *

 **Bold: Magazine article.**

 **This takes place before Hands of Time, and shortly after Day of the Departed. The next chapter will be back in the present, but I will write other chapters like this, where it explains in more detail why exactly Jay is so freaking mad at Wu.**


	12. Haha! Gotcha!

_**Nya**_

Nya was in a mood.

Her boyfriend was in some kind of come, which nobody knew anything about, except for Morro, who wasn't exactly a friend and couldn't be trusted.

And all Morro said anyway was that they couldn't cover his face, because he'd want to see what was going on.

That was pretty much all that happened yesterday, along with the chasing and the falling.

Oh, and then there was the whole thing where nobody could touch Jay anymore after he fell down several times, because he started generating more and more electricity and it was getting dangerous.

Much to her (vicious) regret, only the two ghosts could touch Jay without rubber gloves and rubber boots to avoid getting shocked and thrown across the room.

When morning came, she hoped that the previous day's events were nothing but a dream, but she was proven to be wrong when she walked down into the dining hall to find Jay still on the table and Kai attempting to move him while wearing a pair of rubber gloves, in order to avoid getting shocked and thrown into a wall , which was how they found out that Jay was generating more electricity than normally and which was how they got that nifty Cole-shaped hole in the one wall, the Zane-shaped dent in the fridge and the Lloyd-shaped burn on the floor.

Lloyd was, thankfully, completely fine and just absorbed some of the electricity and singed his hair.

Cole was practically a rock, so he was fine.

And Zane, being a Nindroid, was just as fine.

Cole took Lloyd to Ninjago City to get their hair fixed and to get away from the temple, which was, according to him, full of sad, quiet people who acted like they were at a funeral.

Not that she blamed them for leaving. In fact, she was just about to go out to Ninjago City to get Cyrus Borg to come in and see what could be done. And maybe get her and Kai's parents to come in and see as well, just in case this had something to do with his Elemental Powers.

It might, considering.

She was in Jay's room for a while before she left, looking for something that might explain how to help him. There was a box filled with action figures, old costumes and an entire series of pirate movies.

Under the bed, there was a fancy bag with an old shoe in it, as well as a note that said **"Dear losers, did you really think I would hide it under my bed?"** but nothing about what caused Jay to get all zappy like that.

She had no idea who the losers were that Jay left the note for, and she had no idea what "it" was, but apparently Jay found it important enough to hide.

But it was Jay, so it could be anything and anyone from Cole and pudding cups, to Lloyd and a cool invention Jay wanted to show later.

Jay would be soo happy when he could show the others one of his inventions for the first time and watch their faces when he explained in excruciating detail how exactly it worked.

But now he was gone and there was a piece of paper stuck on Nya's foot.

It was an article from a celebrity magazine from a few weeks back, carefully ripped out. Nya picked it up and put it in her pocket before leaving, promising herself to read it later.

She got in her car, deciding not to summon her dragon, as it would attract too much attention, and because, unlike the boys, she didn't care for it much.

She looked through her glove compartment for her wig so she wouldn't be recognised by people on the streets, because despite the fact that she wasn't one of the most popular ninjas (that was Kai), she was still fairly recognisable on the streets.

Suddenly, she heard voices talking behind the door.

"It's just you and me now." That was Zane. "We have the _whole_ temple to ourselves."

"Unless you count Jay and Morro." That sounded like Kai.

"Morro is in Jay's room right now, trying to clean up the mess from yesterday."

"Well, what if the others come back early?" Kai sounded worried. "Or Morro finishes cleaning?"

"There's no need to worry, Kai. Morro's hands keep going through the things he tries to pick up and if you worry about the others, I'll check for them on the security feed."

Nya turned on her car, which was, thankfully, very quiet. Kai's voice spoke again. "So what do we tell the others we've been doing all day?"

"Perhaps we can tell them that we've been doing laundry." Zane's voice got sad. "It's such a shame that we can't do anything to help our brother wake up."

Nay pushed the button that opened the garage door and reversed out of there, wondering what the heck her brother and Zane were doing that they didn't want her or the others finding out.

Not that it mattered, because she was now in Ninjago City, heading straight for Borg Industries.

She got out of her car, wearing her fake glasses and her blonde wig, and walked in through the doors, straight to the receptionist's desk.

"Hi, I'm Natasha Romanov, I have an appointment with Mr Borg."

It was a fake name Nya used a lot. She didn't know where it came from, but she thought it sounded cool. Almost like she was a top-secret spy sent to kill a man.

"You'll have to wait a minute," the receptionist said with a bored, apathetic tone of voice, gesturing to the nearby couch, where a great, big, blonde man was loudly talking to the tiny, nervously shaking man sitting next to him, trying to calm him down.

Nya sat down as far from them as she could, ignoring the angry glare she got from an elderly janitor with the name **"Stan** " written on his nametag.

Her appointment was in an hour, so Nya would have to wait a while next to the boisterous blond who was excited about how great the coffee in the building was, while his tiny friend was trying to get him to calm down.

Just about when Nya started to get bored, she remembered the article in her pocket and brought it out to read it.

 **Famous actress, Julia Libber, just returned to her native Ninjago for unknown reasons.**

 **After the death of her husband and their two children, who were nine and one respectively, Julia Libber left Ninjago and became a theatre actress in Metalonia, a profession she describes as being far more deserving of her skills than TV-acting. She said that she thought that she'd never return to Ninjago after the attack that killed her family, but something brought her back.**

 **She refuses to say what it is, but many believe that it may have something to do with her deceased family and their murders. Others believe that she became a spy for the Metalonian government while there and simply wishes to gather up Ninjagoan secrets to sell for profit.**

Underneath the article, there was a photo of a fifty-something woman next to a photo of a much younger blonde with a man and two children. They were the same woman, apparently, but the older woman seemed very bitter about something.

The article had more, but the next page wasn't there.

"Friend Banner, I have the feeling that we are in the wrong realm," the giant blond man suddenly announced, bringing out a giant hammer and vanishing into thin air, taking his tiny friend with him and startling everybody, including Nya.

The receptionist called out Nya's face name, telling her that Mr Borg was ready to see her now.

She went up the lift, all the way to Borg's office, and found the man waiting for her and smiling kindly.

"Nya, what a lovely surprise, my dear."

If Nya noticed that Borg's eyes were of a slightly different colour than usual, then maybe things would've been different. Maybe she could've helped him. Maybe she would've stopped talking. Maybe she would've noticed the out of character way that he moved and talked.

"It's Jay," Nya told him. "We found him unconscious in his room, eyes all glowing and he now, we can't even tough him anymore, because he's generating enough electricity to throw _Cole_ though the wall and now, we have to handle him with gloves."

Borg nodded quietly, clearly thinking. "Well, I should probably come and see it personally so I can better know how to help."

Nya gave him a grateful smile. "Thank you."

If Nya paid just a little more attention, she could've avoided what happened next.

A ghost floated out of Borg's body, resulting him screaming (and screaming some more), and dodged Nya's blasts of water.

The ghost looked to be a young woman, about twenty, twenty-one, with long, flowing green-hued black hair.

She wore many robes, like the ones that were fashionable thousands of years ago, along with jade beads around her neck in many layers. Nya kept shooting blasts of water at the ghost, but the woman was too fast.

"You're going to have to do better than that, my dear." The ghost lovingly ran her fingers through Nya's wig, pulling it off with a gentle smile. "I used to be a Shogun, you know. I used to rule Ninjago. And I don't do well being the one to do the serving."

Nya shot another blast of water at the ghost, who dodged again and just looked disappointed.

"I was hoping that you would be of use to me, but if you can't even aim your power, then what's the use?"

The ghost vanished in a green mist, leaving Nya puzzled until she noticed the horrified way Borg was looking at her.

"She went into you," Borg gasped. "That's bad, so very, very bad…"

Nya tried to speak, but she couldn't open her mouth.

"As I said, Cyrus Borg," Nya heard herself speak, "I don't do well serving others. This girl was of great use to me, getting rid of the Preeminent."

Borg tried to wheel himself out of the office, but Nya felt herself leaping forward, grabbing the inventor and lifting him off the wheelchair. "The other ghosts, they are a threat to me and my interests." Now her voice was changing to be like the ghostly woman's. "I won't let them get to me again. Not like with the Preeminent. And not like before."

"What do _I_ have to do with this? I never…"

Nya could feel herself being forced to smile, something she didn't want to do. "You were of use to me by aiding the ninjas. Now, you will be of use to me by aiding them again."

Borg made a confused sound. "Why do you need me to help…?"

"Well, I have extremely powerful ghosts under my command." Nya watched as the ghost moved Borg closer to her face against her will. She tried to fight back, but apparently this ghost was more powerful than Morro and she was weaker than Lloyd. "I have plans for Ninjago. Plans I don't want to get ruined like the Preeminent had _her_ plans ruined. And for that, my soldiers need living bodies to stay unaffected by water. I think those ninjas would make pretty good hosts for them, wouldn't you agree?"

Borg glared at Nya. Or the ghost in Nya. "And what if I won't help?"

The ghost laughed as she left Nya's body. "Oh, my poor, innocent little bag of flesh!"

Nya gently helped Borg back into his wheelchair.

"I don't even need _your_ consent!" The ghost pulled out a necklace with a strange pendant on it from her pocket. The pendant had a gem in the middle of it, which looked like the golden eye of a black cat. "All I need is to put this pretty little trinket around your neck, and you'll be possessed by the greatest, most _brilliant_ , most _genius_ PAIN IN THE GHOSTLY NECK EVER KNOWN TO NINJAGO!"

Nya created some water in her hands.

"It doesn't even _have_ to be you. It can be anybody. From Nya here, to her boyfriend sitting in a coma back home, to even the homeless man digging through your junk for food." The ghost snuck closer. "I only need _him_ in this whole mess, and he only serves _me_."

Nya shot a blast of water at the ghostly lady. This time, she didn't miss.

The amulet was dropped on the floor as the ghost vanished, this time not coming back.

"Thank goodness for water," Borg joked, but Nya could see he was still shaky from his recent encounter with the strange ghost. "So, you said you need my help with something, right?"

"It's okay if you don't want…"

"That ghost's been in my body since three months ago, hiding from something, pulling me along like a puppet on strings." Borg looked down at the amulet on his floor. "I need to get out of here, even if it's just for a little while."

Nya picked up the amulet as if she was picking up a bomb. "So what do we do with _this_?"

"Burn it, break it, I don't care, just keep it away from me." Borg wheeled himself to the elevator and waited for Nya to come along, putting the amulet in her pocket, just in case. Misako might know something about it and the ghost connected to it.

But now, she had another question for Borg, one that involved another kind of ghost.

"What do you know about Julia Libber?" she asked.

Borg froze a little, then he turned bright pink. "She was my first crush as a teenager."

Okay, so _that_ made some weird mental images. "Gross."

Borg looked so insulted, that Nya couldn't help but laugh a little. "Sorry, I'm sorry, I didn't mean it like that."

"Anyway, seventeen years ago, she left Ninjago because someone killed her family. Her husband, her two sons, she needed to get away." The elevator dinged to a stop in the lobby. "They never found the killers, but her sons' bodies were never found either, and sometimes, somebody comes out of nowhere and claim that they're one of her missing kids."

"That's pretty cruel, claiming to be some poor woman's dead kid," Nya whispered. "Why would someone do something like that?"

"Money, I guess." Borg allowed Nya to push him out of the doors and to her car. "Some people will do anything to get a lot of money for very little work, and pretending to be a mourning, very wealthy woman's long-lost son, well, that would be just the kind of work some people would be willing to do for that kind of money."

Nya helped Borg into the passenger side of her car and folded up his wheelchair to put in the back when she was done.

"It's still pretty cruel."

Borg nodded. "I know, Nya. The world just works that way sometimes."

"I heard she's back in Ninjago," Nya told the older man, who made the exact sound girls would make when her brother walked into the room.

"We should go see her!"

"Wait, Borg, no!" Nya tried to think of a good reason not to go. "We don't even know where she's staying!"

"Ninjago Luxury Holiday Inn!" Borg exclaimed, looking up from his BorgWatch. "Step on it!"

Well, the guy could use some cheering up, and it's not like Jay was going anywhere.

And truth be told, so could Nya.

Why not?

* * *

 **While writing this chapter, I discovered that my hair was finally long enough to be tied back again, so yay!  
**

 **Also, we're going to meet Jay's birth mom pretty soon. Please comment! :)! (that's a loud smiley face, I'm smiling very loudly)**

 **I'll also be starting another Ninjafo Fanfic very soon, which is an Element Swap AU, where all of the ninjas are more like real-life ninjas were (hiding in the shadows and stuff like that) and have very different elemental powers.**


	13. White Room

_**Cole**_

Jay was keeping secrets.

Big secrets.

Cole couldn't help but be worried about his friend.

And not just because he was in some kind of a coma and turned into a living (hopefully) tazer.

He hid the fact that he found out what happened to his biological family. He hid the fact that he was related to Morro. He didn't tell _anyone_ that he brought Morro home.

Why was Jay so mad at Wu? It's not _his_ fault that Jay was adopted and related to Morro, and if Wu didn't tell him, it was most likely for his own good.

The Blue Ninja freaks out _way_ too much.

But this was over the top, even for him.

Cole knew that he was wrong for not telling anyone this, but about six weeks ago, he walked in on Jay having a mental breakdown. He was crying in the bathtub, fully clothed and soaking wet. Jay bolted. Cole chased him.

They ran through Ninjago city.

The Ninjagoans thought they were running some kind of a marathon, as Cole later realised, and joined in.

The others thought that Cole was chasing Jay because he was mad that Jay broke his laptop.

Cole didn't even _have_ a laptop. Jay must've accidently broken his own and dumped it in Cole's room…

Jay, on the other hand, just didn't want to talk about what was going on and when they were back home, they both mysteriously had marathon numbers stapled to their shirts. Jay was 48 and Cole was 19.

Cole thought that it would be easy to catch Jay, with him being less athletic than Cole, but Jay's powers allowed him to go faster.

Not "Master of Speed" fast, but much faster than Cole.

It was a good thing (for Cole) that Jay tripped, fell down and broke his arm and also badly scraped said arm and one of his knees.

Jay still tried to get away, but Cole was faster and managed to catch his limping friend and forcibly carry him to a nearby hospital.

Jay got some anaesthesia, which made him very chatty (and confused, because he thought that the doctors stole his thumb) and among the gibberish Jay was saying, Cole managed to catch the name "Ronin" before Jay started crying again and let loose a string of (loud) curses.

Lloyd pulled Cole out of his inner musings by asking him what he thought about his new haircut ( _why would you_ do _that to yourself?!_ ) and Cole had to ask the hairdresser to fix it, much to Lloyd's disappointment, and when the kid started protesting, Cole threatened to fix it himself unless he sat down and allowed the hairdresser to fix it.

Which meant that Lloyd's hair was shaved off, the hairdresser got a tip, and Cole had to take the newly bald Lloyd to get something to cover his head (no, Lloyd, you're not getting a wig).

"Why can't I get a wig?" Lloyd asked when they left the hairdresser. "If I have a wig, then…"

"Lloyd, I kind of have to talk to Ronin when we're done, so I don't have the time for an argument. You're not getting a wig." Cole ignored the death glare Lloyd was giving him. "And you're grounded until your hair grows back for asking the hairdresser to give you a Mohawk. I know you're becoming a teenager… you know, for real this time… but what were you thinking?"

"I wanted to have a Mohawk."

Cole sighed.

"And you're not my dad."

Cole sighed again.

"You can't ground me."

"No," Cole admitted, "I'm not your father. And guess what? I don't care right now."

Cole took off his belt, which he used to lasso Lloyd and tie him up, after which he lifted the boy up over his shoulder and carry him like a sack of flour.

"We're getting you a hat, you're grounded from television, games and going on patrol for a _month_ , and just to make sure you understand that you're being punished, I'm getting you the stupidest hat I can find, and you have to wear it the entire time, except when you're showering, and I'm carrying you like this until we're at Ronin's, so stop squirming."

"You can't do this!" Lloyd argued. "Let me go!"

"What the heck happened to you two?" the familiar voice of Nya asked behind Cole.

Cole swung around, ignoring Lloyd, who was hitting him as hard as he could (it hurt, but Cole wasn't going to let go) and saw Nya standing right in front of him, looking very confused.

"Lloyd asked the hairdresser for a Mohawk," Cole said, "and she gave it to him."

"What happened to it?" Nya asked, looking very amused.

"I asked her to shave it off."

Nya nodded. "Good, good. Kai would _freak_ if he saw Lloyd like that."

"I thought you were going to get Mr Borg to help with Jay."

Nya nodded. "Yeah, I have him. But we got attacked by a ghost and I'm taking him to see this actress he has a crush on before we head home."

Cole looked around. "Where is he?"

Nya nodded her head in the direction of a flower shop, where Cole could see the businessman's head among the millions of flowers.

Lloyd groaned.

"So, why are you carrying Lloyd like that?"

"He's grounded." Cole had enough of being hit over and over like that, so he put the boy down on the sidewalk. "For a month. Look, I have to ask Ronin something, and I don't think it's very smart to take Lloyd with me, because, you know, he's mad and not in the best mood right now, so I was wondering…"

"I'll take him home the moment we're done meeting this woman," Nya said with a feeble smile.

Cole knew it was a bad thing to leave behind Lloyd with Nya while he was in a mood like that, but he had to find out why Jay was so mad at Wu, and he had a feeling that Ronin knew the reason.

He said goodbye to Nya (just for the moment) and summoned his dragon to fly to Styx faster than a car could ever take him.

There were so many questions.

The first one was, of course, why Jay was mad at Wu.

It was dark by the time Cole was in Styx, but if he used a car or a train, he would've been there much later.

He banged on Ronin's door.

And banged.

And banged.

"What's your problem? I'm trying to sleep here!" Ronin's voice complained from inside. "If this is about the…"

The door opened, revealing Ronin in his pyjamas and slippers, looking like the terrible mess of a human being which he was.

"Cole, what are you doing here at…" Ronin looked at his watch. "Six pm…"

"We need to talk," Cole told the mercenary.

"If this is about the time I kidnapped your friend and sold him to Chen, I'm sorry," Ronin groaned. He moved out of the way, though, and let Cole in.

"No, this is about…"

"If this is about the time when I betrayed you guys to Morro to save my own ass, I'm sorry."

Ronin put on the coffee, yawning and groaning at the same time as he scratched his face.

"No, this is about…"

"If this is about the time when I had to remove your friend's memories, then I'm sorry, but the old man paid me to and I put them back the moment he figured out what happened."

"No, this is about… Wait, what?" Cole got a cup of black coffee set down in front of him.

Ronin yawned again. "If this is about the time I…"

"No, wait, what was that about removing someone's memories?" Cole asked, nearly spilling the coffee as he stood up. "What was that about?"

Ronin stopped yawning and stared at Cole. "He didn't tell you?" The mercenary laughed. "And here I thought you guys were friends."

"Whose memories did you take?" Cole demanded. "Was it Jay?"

Ronin took a sip of his coffee. "Yep."

"Wu paid you?"

"Yep."

"And Jay figured it out at some point, right?"

"Right." Ronin took another sip of his coffee. "Yelled at me until I gave 'em back."

"When exactly…" Cole took a sip of the coffee, but it was _so very bitter_ that he spat it out. "When exactly did this happen?"

Ronin put his coffee down on the counter. "Wu had me remove his memory of finding out about… something… for a very nice sum of money. He made me swear not to tell anyone."

"That thing is that Jay and Morro are brothers, right?"

Ronin shrugged. "Well, yeah. They had a pretty big fight about it. He locked himself in his room for a month during that fight and Wu spent a lot of time trying to coax him outa there with baskets of fruit. Then he called me, and the rest is history."

Cole's theory about the relation of Jay and Morro now proven to be true, he now had a different question.

"Right now, Jay is in some kind of a coma and his eyes are glowing and everything." Ronin's eyes widened. "Do you know anything about that?"

Ronin opened his silverware drawer and removed out an old book as a response.

The pages were turned until Ronin found one with a painting of a woman in green clothes, who had a ghost sticking its hand in her chest. Her eyes were glowing green and she didn't show any emotion, while there were plants all around her, wrapping themselves around her leg.

"It's called Overpowerment, and only ghosts from the Douai era can cause it, and it only affects Elemental Masters," Ronin told Cole. "They mostly use it to torture the living. Survivors say it's like being in a white room, filled with nothing, and you can see what's going on through some kind of a magic mirror, but you can't do anything and your powers slowly kill you from the inside. They're never the same again…"

"That's stupid. Our elements can't hurt us," Cole scoffed. "Trust me. Jay got hit by lightning, electricity and electric eels, and he was _fine_."

Maybe Cole was in denial. Maybe Cole was trying to tell himself that Jay was going to be fine and wasn't being…

"Nope. Jay's powers are going to kill him if he doesn't wake up. If you dump him in the middle of nowhere and leave him there, he'll either wake up pissed, or he'll turn into some kind of elemental bomb which will, in his case, vaporise everything." Ronin shook his head. "There's nothing about how to wake someone up from this state, though."

"So there's nothing we can do to help?"

Ronin stood up. "Well, in most of the cases when somebody woke up, magic was involved."

"You just said that there's nothing!" Cole argued. "Why…"

"Look, like I just said, those who woke up were never the same again," Ronin told Cole, showing him a picture of a woman dressed in various shades of grey. "This is Mera, an Elemental Master of Smoke from a long time ago. She was Overpowered, and when she woke up, she wasn't herself again."

Cole glared at the former mercenary.

"Look, when she woke up, she was different. People who knew her described her as "not Mera" because she stopped talking, avoided people and locked herself up in her own home, never leaving again." Ronin returned Cole's glare as he spoke. "Her children never saw her again. They were one, two and five, and her husband was dead. She died fifty years later. Before the incident, she _loved_ people, was almost never in her home if she could help it and even threw elaborate parties for the village."

That's an isolated incident," Cole argued.

The book's pages turned again, this time revealing a man with the symbol for Wind behind him. "Arrin Skye, an Elemental Master of Wind. Great guy, loved by all, woke up and buried himself alive three days later, and had to be looked after by the other Masters for the rest of his life so he wouldn't do something like that again."

"So you're saying we _shouldn't_ help Jay?" Cole asked. "That we should just let him _die_?!"

Ronin opened the book on another page, revealing a man wearing a creepy mask. "Hermes, Master of Speed. He woke up without the use of magic. He didn't freak out as badly as Arrin Sky and Mera, and he lived a normal life after the incident, and again, he woke up _without_ magic. Listen to me, usually I don't care what you guys do, but this time, I'm warning you, _don't_ force him to wake up if he doesn't want to."

The book was shoved into Cole's hands and Ronin vanished upstairs, telling Cole to close the door behind him when he left.

Outside, Cole summoned Rocky to fly back home, but the ghost wouldn't let him.

Shrieking and howling all around him.

Then one of them got close.

It looked like one of those old samurai warriors, with a cape and a sword.

Cole tried to fight him off as well as he could, but in the end, high in the sky, the ghost stuck its hand in Cole's chest.

Everything flickered between the dark night and a white room.

It was like someone was flipping the switch on and off over and over again, until the switch stayed on.

He was in the white room.

He wasn't standing, he wasn't floating, he was just… there.

Then he hit something.

Hard.

Very hard.

He was pretty sure he broke several bones.

In front of him, there was a screen making static.

There was the ghost. The same ghost who attacked him. The ghost was _in_ the screen.

"Give us Morro, and we might spare you and your little blue friend," the ghost demanded.

Cole struggled to find his footing.

"We will release your friend, we will release you, and we will not harm anyone else, all you have to do is…"

"You're one of the ghosts who attacked Jay, aren't you?" Cole interrupted. "You wanted Morro for a petty scheme of revenge, but you can't get to him because of Jay. So you did this to Jay, but you still can't get to him."

The ghost looked like he bit into a lemon. "We can't get to Morro because his brother is currently keeping him safe. My associate, June, went to extract Morro from him with force, but unfortunately, Morro wasn't there to _be_ extracted. He almost got Jay to talk, but Yang chased him away. For allowing himself to be chased away by a much simpler ghost, June was… assimilated for treachery and cowardice."

"So why are you guys working for this guy?!" Cole yelled at the ghost in the screen. "Shouldn't you do something to help your friend?!"

The ghost groaned. "I can't. Just like _you_ can't help _your_ friend. It's too late. It's too late…"

The ghost vanished from the screen.

Cole had no idea where to go now.

He had no idea how to get away and help Jay while he was stuck in this cold, empty, white room.

It was over for him now.

* * *

 **Big day. First, we're getting our first rain of the season here, then, I finally finished this chapter, and now, I put in two of my favorite OC's in this fanfic. The ghost who put Jay in the coma is called June and the one who attacked Cole is known as Millie or Milla(not his real name, just a cute nickname June used for him).  
**

 **Also, yes, Lloyd had a Mowhawk and is now bald and grounded because of it. (Lol)**

 **Poor Cole.**


	14. A Rented Hotel Room: Meeting the Mother

_**Julia**_

The day the framed photo in Julia's hands was taken on one of the happiest days of her life.

It was the day her younger son was born. The photo showed herself and her three boys: Cliff, Morro and the baby in the hospital. When Morro first saw his new brother, he was convinced (by Cliff, because of course he'd do something like that) that Jay was a shaved monkey.

It was all fun and games until Morro woke them up a few nights later, asking when they were going to give the monkey to the zoo, because he was annoyed with the screaming.

When Cliff snickered at that, Julia kneed him in the stomach and explained to her son that his father had made a joke when he said that the baby was a monkey.

Morro still wanted to give the baby to the zoo, however.

But the boy quickly warmed up to the idea of having a brother once the baby started moving around and crawling.

Then, when the baby was about a year old, there was an attack on the Gordon household and Cliff ordered Morro to take his brother and run.

She believed them both to be dead, but then she found some footage of the ninjas, and one of them had powers just like her own.

She contacted said ninja, and he discovered, from the worst possible source, that he was adopted.

Julia gave a sharp scream when the intercom for her room went off with a beep, snapping herself out of her thoughts.

" _Mrs Libber? There's a pair of ninja and a Mr Borg here to see you. Should I send them up, or just make them leave?"_

Julia pressed the button next to the intercom. "Who are the ninjas?"

" _Mrs Libber, you have…"_

Julia pressed the button again.

" _Mrs Libber…"_

And again.

" _HOLD THE DAMN BUTTON DOWN!"_

Julia held the button down as she was asked. "There's no need for that kind of language, young man. Who are the ninjas?"

" _Sorry ma'am. They are Nya Smith and Lloyd Garmadon, and they're here with Mr Cyrus Borg of Borg Industries. Should I send them home, or may I send them up?"_

Julia pushed the button for the intercom down again. "You may send them up, please," Julia told the man at the front desk.

When she looked down, she realised that she had dropped the photo.

Either her guests were very fast, or she was being very slow picking the photo up, but either way, they came in to see her lying on her stomach on the bed, picking up shards of glass and doing her best to spare the picture frame from more destruction, her face red from crying.

Morro made it for her with Cliff's help while she was still in the hospital after the baby was born, and she didn't want to ruin it any more than she already did by dropping it again.

"Um…" the boy hummed, "What happened?"

"I dropped my photo," Julia said with a sigh. "Be careful, okay? There's glass _everywhere_."

The girl got down to help Julia pick up the shards of glass and yanked the boy down to help. Julia couldn't help but notice that he had a freshly shaved head.

Wasn't Lloyd supposed to be the one with the long, flowing blond locks?

"What the hell happened to your hair?" Julia found herself asking. She immediately put her hands over her mouth to stop herself from cursing in front of the two teenagers again, and asking another potentially disastrous question. For all she knew, he could've gotten sick or something and his hair all fell out.

"He got a bad haircut and Cole decided that it would be better for him to just be bald instead," the girl told Julia. "We brought him a hat on the way here, but he doesn't want to wear it."

Julia tried to remember which one was Cole.

"Oh, right, the earth guy." Julia sat up. "So, you want to take this elsewhere?"

Julia put her new sweater on over her head. When nobody answered, Julia continued. "There's glass everywhere, so I'm just going to take my picture, and my frame, and leave so room service can clean this up. When I just came back, my son took me to this café, and they have the _best_ coffee in all of Ninjago."

Cyrus looked up at her. "Are you sure he's really your son and not some…"

Julia held up her hand, instantly shutting the man up. "I have some pretty solid proof, kid. He demanded that we take every test known to mankind, and then some more, just to make sure that neither one of us are trying to trick the other." She handed the photo to Nya so the kids and Cyrus so they could see what it was. "That's me and the boys. The baby's just a day old there…" Her voice had gotten soft as she talked about the baby.

"That's Morro," Nya whispered. She looked up and looked Julia in the eyes. "I'm afraid that he's pretty dead, Mrs Libber."

Julia shook her head. "No, I'm talking about the baby. _He's_ the one who took me out for coffee."

"That's Fritz Donegan!" Lloyd gasped. "I can't believe it!"

"Did Morro inherit his powers from you, or your husband?" Nya asked. "I'm sorry if I'm butting in on your personal life, but I'm just curious."

"Actually, it's a little bit of both," Julia told the girl as she put her shoes on, "You see, some elements are compatible, and some are not. If they're compatible, then it's highly possible for their kids to inherit both elements. If they're not, then their kids will only inherit one."

Cyrus froze up. "So Elemental Powers are hereditary. I didn't know that. I thought it just happened at random."

Nya made a motion as if she was about to say something, when her phone beeped.

She pulled it out and gave a surprised squeak once she read the text message. "What?!"

The phone beeped again, intensifying Nya's shocked expression, but it was the next beep that caused her to drop her phone.

Julia was curious, okay?

That was why she looked.

The first text was a picture of a walaber licking another walaber, titled "us".

In the next one, the sender apologized and said that they meant to send it to Nya's mother.

The final one clarified that there was a mistake and that they meant to say "brother".

Then the phone started singing "Let it Go" while the image of the robot she saw on TV with her baby flashed on the screen.

Nya just stared at the phone with wide, horror-filled eyes. Lloyd looked over her shoulder as if the phone was some kind of monster or something and he was in a horror movie. Apparently he had seen the texts as well.

Lloyd's phone started singing "This girl is on fire," in his pocket as Nya's phone continued ringing.

The four of them stood there and stared at Nya's phone for ten minutes, until Julia finally had enough and answered it for the poor girl. If she had to listen to Elsa sing another "Let it Go," she was going to scream.

Which was, much to the obvious shock of her guests, was how she answered the phone.

The caller's phone was dropped, judging by the noises in the background, then it was picked up. Julia handed the phone to Nya, who was giggling a little, and soon found out that she accidently put the phone on speaker.

" _Nya, I am sorry for startling you with that photograph,"_ the person on the other end said with a robotic voice. _"I truly meant to send them to your brother."_

" _Zane!"_ another person scolded. _"Can't you just make something up?"_

"Just so you know, I've got the phone on speaker and Lloyd, Mr Borg and Morro's mom are all here with me, so I have three witnesses."

" _I thought Lloyd was with Cole,"_ the first person whispered. _"What happened?"_

"Lloyd shaved his head, so Cole grounded him and went to Ronin's to check something out and just now, I got the weirdest text from Zane that was apparently meant for _you_." Nya folded her arms. "What the _hell…_ "

Everybody else in the room gasped.

"… are the two of you doing?"

" _Nya, watch your language,"_ the second person scolded. _"And anyway, we're just doing laundry."_

Nya froze up. "Laundry. Like you two were discussing this morning?"

" _No, we are_ actually _doing laundry,"_ the first person replied. _"And how did you even know about that? Were you eavesdropping?"_

" _They got into a fight about something,"_ a third voice added. _"Something about a headboard. Then they made up. Then they made out. Then they decided that they should be doing laundry, just in case somebody decides to…"_

" _She's got the phone on speaker!"_ the second person hissed. _"And they're with your_ mother _!"_

"Jay?" Julia asked hopefully. She hadn't seen Jay since he took her to the coffee place and that was about five days ago, and she was getting a little worried about him.

The people on the other end of the line dropped their phone, followed by Nya's phone and Julia's photo. Lloyd looked like he might faint and Cyrus actually did. Or he fell asleep during the conversation.

Somebody picked up the other phone.

" _Actually, it's Morro,"_ the person who picked up the phone whispered quietly.

Julia shakily picked up Nya's phone.

She picked up her photo.

Yes, she heard what happened to him.

And yes, she heard how he almost killed everything.

But he was still her son.

She carefully put the photo down next to her before she spoke with a trembling voice. "Hi, sweetheart." She ignored Nya's shocked expression. "How are you?"

" _I'm doing okay,"_ Morro told her. _"I died a while ago and now I'm a ghost, so bummer, but it's all okay."_

"Aw, sweetheart, I know." She clutched the phone in her hand. "It's okay, it's okay. I'm here. I'm here."

She could hear her own heart beating in her chest as she waited for Morro to say something.

" _It's all my fault!"_ Morro blurted out. _"He's not moving, and if it wasn't for me, it wouldn't have happened!"_

Julia gently squeezed Nya's phone, as if Morro could feel it through the phone. "No, no, honey, it's not your fault. Sometimes bad things just happen."

" _Jay was hiding me from some bad ghosts, then my friend tried hiding too, then my friend got in a lizard, then Jay got sick and then I wasn't there when the ghosts came and now he's in a coma or something and we can't wake him up…"_

Julia stayed quiet the whole time, listening as her elder son's ghost talked on and on for hours and tried to explain how his brother got hurt.

It reminded her a lot of back when they were still kids and Morro would annoy the baby so much that he'd start crying or blubbering and Morro would try to explain _why_ the baby was crying and blubbering.

"Morro, I'm not mad." She was, but she wasn't going to let her already freaking out firstborn know that, and she had guests, so it was against her best interest to start yelling at him. "Just take a deep breath and listen to…"

The phone on the other end shut down very suddenly.

Julia handed the phone back to Nya.

"Are you kids okay?" Julia asked. Lloyd was sitting in an armchair now, white as a sheet. Nya was resting her face in her hands. Cyrus was breathing, thankfully, but he was still unconscious. "I understand if…"

"I don't believe you," Nya suddenly said, her voice as cold as ice. "Morro came here before he got to Jay and asked you to lie for him. They're not related and they're not brothers. I _refuse_ to believe that Jay would just _not_ tell me something this big."

Lloyd looked up at Nya. "It makes sense, if you think…"

"She's his _mother_ , Lloyd. _Of course_ she'll lie for him."

Julia swallowed her anger at being called a liar, and to her face at that too, and stood up. "So, the offer for coffee still stands. Do you three want to go with me, or do you want to continue insulting me to my face?"

Okay, so she didn't completely swallow her anger at being insulted like that.

Nya got up and started to leave the room, but Julia caused her to freeze at the sound of static crackling at her fingertips.

Jay had the exact same reaction when they finally met in person.

He refused to believe that he and Morro were related. He refused to believe her when she said that she was his birth mom. They had a DNA test done, and then he demanded more proof when the tests came in as positive.

She showed him her lightning, and that's when he just…

Broke down.

She didn't understand why he was like that, when only a year ago, he was perfectly fine with the idea that she was his mother and had the same element as her.

She had no idea what changed in all that time.

Nya still left, and poor, poor bald Lloyd had to run after her, pushing Cyrus ahead of him.

Julia fell back in her bed, and sighed.

Nya was the spitting image of Maya.

Sadly, she had Ray's trust issues.

Julia wondered to herself what happened to her old friends after she left Ninjago.

She received the news that they had gone missing a few years ago, and she never heard any news from them since.

Perhaps _that_ was why Nya refused to listen to her.

As she lay there, alone with her own thoughts, she faded off into a dreamless sleep.

* * *

 **I have decided to continue this fic. I hope I'm not breaking any rules by removing the adoption notice or changing my mind. I was stressed, sleep-deprived, and have exams coming up. Thank you all to the nice reviews saying that they enjoy my fic. I hope this one is up to standard.  
**

 **Julia knows Maya and Ray have gone missing, but she has no idea that they've been found.**

 **Please review and sorry for scaring ya'll. :)**


	15. The Marvelous Misadventures of Ghoultar

_**Ghoultar**_

Ghoultar was going to fix this, even if he didn't know how.

In the body of a small lizard which he possessed in a panic at the suggestion of a sarcastic Morro, the ghost moved his scaly body through Sensei Yang's formerly cursed temple and to the room where he knew Morro's younger brother was resting on the table.

Fearful of being discovered by the bad ghosts hunting him despite their promises not to after he regrettably told them where Morro said he was going to go, Ghoultar stayed in the lizard body despite his struggles to get on the table and get a good look at what was going on.

Morro must have thought it was funny to bring him as a pet to the green ninja boy, but Ghoultar knew as well as any other ghost who dealt with the Douai before that it only trapped both of them in the temple, because those evil ghosts didn't give up so easily. If he knew them, and he did, they were patrolling the area, waiting for a single wrong move from anyone on the inside so they could attack like they did with the blue ninja boy who is Morro's brother.

The lizard was the only thing protecting Ghoultar from those bad ghosts.

Sadly, Ghoultar didn't take the time to remember that the signature move of the Douai was causing Overpowerment, and neither did he take in account that living things could get hurt when they toughed things that would hurt them. So, by accident, he touched a person who was generating enough electricity at the moment to power all of Ninjago for a hundred years and still have some left over, and that was if Ninjago was being very cruel to the environment and using every electric appliance at the same time.

RIP, little lizard friend.

At least now, Ghoultar had a little ghost pet, but unfortunately, it looked very angry and licked its eyeballs at him.

"Shh," Ghoultar told the lizard, which wasn't making a sound to begin with, but was instead very focused in staying angry with him.

Ghoultar could hear the white ninja robot boy talking about the red ninja boy about which bed they were going to keep, which he didn't know the complete reason for the conversation for.

"I'm thinking my bed; yours makes too much sound," the red ninja boy said. "Jay said he could hear it all the way to his room."

"That's because you were jumping on the bed like it was a trampoline," the white ninja robot boy scolded. "I had to sleep with that device under my bed for a whole week because of you."

Ghoultar turned invisible at the exact time the two ninjas walked into the room. The lizard ghost didn't have to, because it was a weaker ghost and had very little power in the living realm, so it wasn't seen by the two ninjas anyway. The red ninja boy was holding a basket of neatly folded laundry, and was looking very mad.

He let go of the basket, dropping it to the floor, and stormed off. Ghoultar watched as the white ninja robot boy, in a panic, picked up the laundry that was all over the floor now, put it upright, and ran out of the room.

"Kai! Come back! I didn't mean it!" the white ninja robot boy could be heard yelling once he was done cleaning up. "Kai!"

Ghoultar turned visible again and studied the unconscious blue ninja boy.

The ninja didn't react at all, beyond a small twitch, which he doubted was good, considering that the last person suffering from Overpowerment he was around exploded after twitching like a person who is about to wake up for an hour, giving him and the person's close friends false hope and making them want to stay around when they wake up.

A while after, Ghoultar met a ghost who knew how to wake the person up without any negative side effects, like magic tended to do. The ghost explained how, since it was a ghost who caused it, a ghost could undo it too. The person would just be a little disorientated for a while; the bad ghost had turned their elemental power against them, so it would focus on hurting them instead of protecting them. That would freak out anybody, having ones powers turned against themselves like that.

If Ghoultar remembered correctly, the other ghost said that it was very simple; all that would have to be done is for the ghost to stick his or her arm in the victim's chest, like the Douai does when causing it, and the person would wake up, and not explode (physically).

Ghoultar could hear the red ninja boy yelling at the white ninja robot boy. Apparently, the white ninja robot boy had caught up with him, but the red ninja boy was mad.

"… it was _your_ hard head that made that hole in my headboard, _Zane_!" the red ninja boy yelled. "How did that even happen?!"

Ghoultar could hear the red ninja boy stomping off, while Morro could be heard asking what was going on.

" _Kai!_ " the white ninja robot could be heard saying, sounding close to robotic tears. "I'm sorry!"

Ghoultar, in the meantime, had decided to attempt to wake up the blue ninja boy as he was told by the other ghost after covering up the blue ninja boy's eyes with a dishtowel because his eyes were creepy like that.

Ghoultar could hear footsteps coming to the door right as he had started. He turned invisible and quietly watched as the red ninja boy and the white ninja robot boy came in, followed by a puzzled Morro, still arguing over the headboard with the hole in it.

"I had to tell everyone that I overreacted because I saw a _spider_ , Zane!" the red ninja boy shouted. The white ninja robot boy looked down at his feet sadly.

"Maybe we shouldn't move our rooms in together," the white ninja robot boy said sadly.

Ghoultar tilted his head.

The red ninja boy shook his head wildly. "No, Zane, don't say that! We've been planning this for months, we can't just stop it because of one _little_ argument. We're just stressed, that's all. With all the ghosts," the ninja shot Morro a disapproving glare, then turned back to the white ninja robot boy, "and Jay being like that, everyone's getting a little stressed, okay? I still want us to move our rooms together."

The white ninja robot boy and the red ninja boy hugged, then they kissed. Morro made a disgusted sound and left the room. Ghoultar was becoming more and more aware of the fact that the tiny ghost lizard was glaring at him while he had his hand stuck in a living person's heart, which was beating so fast, it was weird. Almost as weird as witnessing the two ninjas having relationship troubles in the dining area, unaware of the two extra ghosts watching them.

"Maybe we should _actually_ do laundry, just in case the others check it out," the white ninja robot boy suggested.

The red ninja boy picked up the basked of clothes that were still sitting in the basket on the floor and both of them left, presumably to do the laundry.

Ghoultar hurryingly turned visible again and pulled his arm out as fast as he could. The blue ninja boy stopped twitching and was instead just lying there, just as lively as he was five minutes ago.

The ghost decided that maybe the boy just wanted to sleep a little, so to keep himself busy, Ghoultar opened the fridge and helped himself to a chocolate cake marked _**Cole's Cake! Do Not Eat!**_ with caramel. It tasted very good, and Ghoultar didn't leave behind a single crumb.

Up next, was the chocolate bar in the fridge and the cookies in the cookie jar, and finally, the doughnuts, which he started devouring right as the red ninja boy made a horrified gasping noise.

"You told her you meant to send it to our _mother?!_ That's _worse!_ "

"She didn't get it yet," the white ninja robot boy defended. "Okay, now she had it, and she has read it."

"FIX IT!"

The fire ninja boy stormed into the dining area again, where Ghoultar turned invisible again with his head in the cupboard, looking for another sweet snack, other than the ones he already destroyed.

The white ninja robot boy could be heard talking to someone. "Nya, I'm sorry for startling you with that photograph, I truly meant to send it to your brother."

The red ninja boy ran out of the room at a speed that would put the Elemental Master of Speed to shame.

"Zane! Can't you just make something up?!"

" _Just so you know, I've got the phone on speaker and Lloyd, Mr Borg and Morro's mom are all here with me, so I have three witnesses,"_ a female voice said.

Ghoultar stopped caring what the living people and Morro were doing, however, as soon as he noticed that the blue ninja boy was not on the table anymore and was weakly walking over to the fridge. He didn't seem to care about Ghoultar being there and instead, just took something at random, which turned out to be a tomato, and took a bite out of it, before either deciding that he didn't like it, or deciding that he didn't want to eat it, and putting it down on the table he was on only moments before, and opening what was a secret door behind a painting by putting the painting upside-down and going inside, never saying a word.

Ghoultar watched in silence as the painting turned around again.

The ghost turned invisible to sleep off all the food he ate safely.

* * * * *  
Ghoultar woke up to the black former-ghost ninja boy screaming.

"THEY TURNED HIM INTO A TOMATO!"

The Green Ninja (or at least Ghoultar _thought_ it was him; his hair was all gone) gave the black former-ghost ninja boy an odd look. "Cole, I don't think the ghosts turned Jay into a tomato."

The black former-ghost ninja boy didn't seem to believe him. Instead, he gently picked up the tomato and cried. "He was my best friend, and now, he's… he's a fruitgeble. Why do the best people always turn into fruitgebles?!"

The Green Ninja gave his friend a strange look. "Cole, seriously, where were you? This is like the third time you did this. What were you doing?"

The black former-ghost ninja boy didn't answer, he was too busy treating the tomato as if it were a helpless baby he could crush to death with a single wrong move. "Someone took a bite out of you," the ninja sobbed once he found the place where the blue ninja boy had taken a bite out of it. "Maybe if we plant you, you'll grow back?"

Flawless logic, Ghoultar decided, for someone who believed his friend had turned into a tomato.

The angry lizard ghost was still giving Ghoultar the stinkeye, the ghost noticed, and accidently let out a shout, which both alerted the ninjas to the fact that he was there, and which apparently snapped the black former-ghost ninja boy out of whatever was wrong with him.

"You!" the black former-ghost ninja hissed once Ghoultar revealed himself. " _You_ turned my best friend into a fruitgeble!"

Okay, so maybe he was _not_ snapped out of whatever was wrong with him. The ghost reacted by doing the only thing he could do and ran through the door and wall, past the other ninjas, all with a good reason to be surprised, and past the two other ghosts, and turned invisible in the TV room, behind the TV.

For now, he was stuck.

At least until the black former-ghost ninja boy had found his friend and realised that he hadn't turned the blue ninja boy into a tomato.

* * *

 **Sorry for not updating for a while, was very busy and every time I wrote Ghoultar I wrote Ghoultat and I had to fix it. Hope you all had a happy new year and a merry holiday season. Also, I'm sorry for the shorter chapter.  
**


	16. Secret Tunnel

_**Cole**_

Cole had no idea how he got out of the white room, or how he got back to the temple, but what he did know was that he was crying over a squished tomato in the living room and Jay was complaining about how he was going to eat it (the tomato) and holding on to Cole for dear life.

He had no idea why he was crying over the squished vegetable in front of him, but once he realised that his friend was with him and completely fine, Cole grabbed the Master of Lightning in an enormous hug, lifting him up from the ground and was careful not to accidently crush him with his super-strength.

Despite him being gentle, as if Jay was made of glass, the Blue Ninja still made a sound similar to a squeaky toy being squeaked.

"You're alive! You're alive and you didn't explode and you're okay!" Cole exclaimed, ignoring Jay's uncommitted protests to being picked up and his question of where he'd been.

"You were weird since last night," Jay clarified despite the fact that Cole didn't ask. "You thought I turned into a tomato, but you kept calling it a "fruitgeble" and nobody knew what to do with you, then you started chasing Ghoultar, who I have _no idea_ how he got here, then Lloyd managed to lure you into your room and locked you in here with the tomato. You were treating it as if it's a baby or something."

Cole put Jay down, who flopped down on the ground like a wet towel and tried standing up, looking like that baby deer in the movie trying to walk for the first time.

"How long was I locked up in here?" Cole asked, looking around his room. "You said they locked me in last night, but I don't remember anything after the ghost…"

Jay flinched. Cole didn't go on.

"I think it's been about so fifteen hours?" Jay murmured, pulling himself up using Cole as a ladder. "The others brought you breakfast, but you didn't touch anything."

Something didn't feel quite right to Cole. "So they locked you in here with me?"

Jay shook his head. "They have no idea where I am. I think they think I'm still in a coma and was "misplaced"."

Cole grabbed Jay by the shoulders (carefully) and shook him (gently). "You have to tell them that you're okay! We've been worried sick about you! Nya went to get Mr Borg and Lloyd shaved his head and I borrowed a book from Ronin on whatever was going on with you and Morro's been cleaning your room for the past ten days…"

Jay had a faraway look on his face. "I can't do this."

It was an accident, it really was, but Cole let go of Jay, causing him to fall down again, letting out a little scream as his body hit the ground.

"What the heck was that, Cole?!" Jay yelled, getting up much faster this time. " _Twice?!_ "

Jay managed to stay on his feet this time, swaying a little, as if he was going to fall down again soon.

"Jay, I'm sorry," Cole apologized. "I didn't mean to drop you." Then something struck Cole. "The others think you're missing and they didn't find you when they locked me in here?"

Jay stopped swaying after stomping around a little, then he shook his head until his hair was standing in every direction and he looked like he just stuck his fingers in an electric outlet. "No, I came in here after. Through the secret passage." Jay pointed at the light fixture across from Cole's bed, which didn't look much like anything and didn't even light up (Cole tried). "They're all over the place. I found them last year when I was putting up the electricity for the temple."

"Yang never told me about any secret passages," Cole complained, sounding like a child even to his own ears as Jay pulled on the light until the wall opened up like a door. "I would've liked to know too."

Jay let go of the light fixture, which was now hanging uselessly on a thick red velvet rope. "I don't think he ever wanted anyone to find out, or maybe he would've told everyone if we asked him if we had these." Jay was quiet for a little while, then he picked up Cole's flashlight (that was sitting next to the bed) and shrugged. "Or he was trying to cheer me up because I wasn't feeling very okay."

With that, Jay beckoned him to follow and turned on the flashlight once Cole was in the dark tunnel with him.

"So these secret tunnels go _everywhere_ in the temple?" Cole asked, surprised at how _weird_ his voice sounded in the tunnel.

Jay pulled on a weird copper ring that was attatched to the other end of the light fixture, closing the wall behind them. "Yep. Every single room. Yang says he used to use these tunnels to get to the training hall from his room much faster, and when he had to get to a student's room ASAP, he'd use the tunnels too. Careful, okay? There's a lot of ladders and stuff going all over the place, and I don't want you falling off them."

Jay shone the flashlight all over as he spoke and even accidently dropped the flashlight ("I'll fix that") several times before climbing down into a dark hole via ladder holding the flashlight between his teeth.

With nothing else to do, Cole followed his friend and brother (he wondered how Morro would feel if he knew that he and the other ninjas referred to each other as brothers) down the ladder.

The ladder went on several floors beneath the two of them, but Jay decided to stop on the first floor, hitting the wall with his hand, which caused the hallway in front of them to light up not very brightly, but bright enough for them to not need the flashlight anymore.

The Master of Lighting picked up speed, running through the wooden tunnel as fast as he could, ignoring the doors on either side as Cole did his best to keep up without accidently stomping a hole in the floor.

At the end of the tunnel, there was a round room, with labels on each spot. It was more brightly lit than the wooden tunnel and Cole found it extremely easy to read the labels, which had the name of a room printed on each.

"If you stand in a certain spot, you can hear everything that's going on upstairs," Jay happily informed Cole, reminding him of someone he couldn't quite put his finger on.

"That's how you knew when I was locked in my room," Cole whispered as he heard Lloyd informing someone in the kitchen that he was making scrambled eggs, because that was pretty much all he could make.

When he walked onward, he heard Nya's voice, sounding upset at something. He froze in the spot while Jay ran around, hopping from label to label like a child playing hopscotch.

" _I don't see why you two decided to keep something this big from us!"_ Nya's voice scolded. _"The others, I understand, but_ me _? I'm your_ sister _, Kai! Why did you feel like you had to hide an important relationship from me?"_ She sounded close to tears.

" _We didn't want to ruin everything in case it didn't work out,"_ Kai's voice answered. _"I'm sorry."_

" _Maybe I'll take your apology more seriously when Zane's not playing with your hair like that,"_ Nya grumbled.

" _He likes it,"_ Kai and Zane's voices said at the same time.

Jay was still hopping around the room, without a care in the world, while Nya was making horrified sounds upstairs and complaining because Kai never lets anyone touch his hair, not even her or Skylor, to which Zane made a flustered (and flattered) sound while Kai made an embarrassed one.

Then Nya was heard storming off.

Cole was curious about what they were arguing about, but he figured that he was going to find out later anyway.

"Training hall's empty," Jay announced, standing on one leg as he did so. "Follow me!"

Picking up speed, Jay ran back into the wooden tunnel, followed by Cole, who was sure that he had to be careful not to destroy the ancient-looking tunnels.

Jay waited for him, which Cole was grateful for, then he opened a door.

Inside, there was a tiny room and a ladder leading upstairs, with a switch right next to the ladder.

Jay slammed the switch and turned on Cole's flashlight.

"You have to go first because you don't know the way in the dark," Jay told him, shining the light on the ancient wooden ladder as he spoke.

Cole went up.

There was a wall in front of him, but it was different than the one in his room.

The wall in front of him had no knob attached to a velvet rope, but instead, a weird-looking knob.

When Jay came up, he wasted no time in turning the knob, but froze when he heard a voice on the other side.

" _Whoa."_

Both of them jumped back from the knob. It turned by itself from the other side as the person (It sounded like a woman, but it wasn't anyone Cole knew) who was in the training hall spun whatever was on the other side to open and close the secret passages.

Jay was clearly panicking. Cole tried to calm his friend down, but when he picked up his friend to try and keep him from trying to run away, Jay started clawing at him, attempting to get away.

Another familiar voice suddenly stopped the knob from spinning.

" _Hey! Don't touch that!"_ It was Sensei Yang. _"It's a priceless family relic!"_

The woman stuttered apologies as Jay stopped clawing and trying to scratch himself out of Cole's grip. But he also stopped moving in general. For a moment, Cole was worried that Jay, still fragile from whatever the ghost did to him, had died in his arms, but the quiet breathing told him that his friend just fell asleep.

" _It moved by itself!"_ the woman defended herself, but Yang told her that everyone was waiting for her to help Lloyd with dinner. _"I saw it move by itself!"_

" _I know, ma'am,"_ the old ghost sighed. _"The temple's very old and sometimes, things spin when they're not supposed to. And I am pretty sure that having four ghosts around doesn't help much either."_

" _FOUR?!"_ the woman sounded excited. _"That's incredible! Where's the other two?!"_

Yang continued trying to coax the strange woman out of the room, but she didn't seem very interested in leaving until Lloyd let out a shout of "whoops".

The knob spun again.

The wall parted, revealing Sensei Yang standing on the other side, looking both upset and surprised.

"How did you get in the wall, Cole?" Yang asked, faking ignorance as he pulled Cole out by his arm. "We've been looking all over for you!"

Yang spun the sword as he spoke, leading to the wall closing up again, as if it was never open in the first place.

"Where can I find the chives?" the female voice called from the kitchen.

The woman's voice woke Jay up as suddenly as he fell asleep. Cole was surprised by a kick to the face, which he was sure was going to leave a bruise.

The next thing Cole knew, Jay wasn't in his arms anymore and one of the windows shattered.

"My window!" Yang gasped. "Why?!"

Cole ignored the old ghost and instead, jumped after his friend, through the broken window, after Jay, ignoring Yang complaining that the window was now more broken.

He could only hope that his friend was okay and wasn't affected by whatever made the others need to lock him up in his own room. If he were…

Cole was sure that his friend would fall off the edge of the island if he didn't get to him on time. He wasn't about to let that happen.

* * *

 **I hope you enjoy the fanfiction!  
**


	17. Hot Chocolate

_**Lloyd**_

Lloyd was having trouble falling asleep for the past few days, knowing that Morro was in the temple with them and knowing that one of his brothers might never wake up again.

And then there was the little problem of Jay not telling anyone that he was _related_ to the ghostly Master of Wind, which was kind of understandable, seeing what happened between them and Morro when they first met, but if he just _told_ them, they might have avoided the problem that was dealing with Morro living in the temple with them.

When Cole came back, he was the one who discovered that Jay was missing, but he was being all weird, and was convinced that the reason Jay was missing was because he had been turned into a tomato with a bite out of it, which Lloyd was pretty sure the Master of Earth had taken from it.

Morro claimed that he had no idea where Jay was, but there had been sightings of Ghoultar in the temple, so if they searched for him, the creepy ghost might be able to tell them if he knew where the Master of Lightning was.

They had to lock Cole up in his own room to keep him from hurting himself after spending most of the evening keeping him from trying to turn the tomato into Jay.

Best case scenario: Cole was wrong and just on drugs or something.

Worst case: They would have to find a spell to turn the tomato into Jay, only to find that he has a giant bite out of him.

The thought sent shivers up and down his spine.

Another thing that was keeping him up was the sounds that were coming from Kai and Zane's now shared room as they were unpacking.

It sounded as if they were having a fight with the boxes, but that seemed a little immature for them to do.

He was officially awake, though, when he heard something crashing down on the floor and Zane yelling out "My stuff!" at around midnight.

Forcing the child in a teenager's body to be the mature person in the group was a big mistake.

He attacked their door until a slightly pink Kai opened it with a sheepish look on his face.

"Sorry, did we wake you?"

"I think a better question would be who you _didn't_ wake!" Lloyd yelled.

" _Lloyd! I'm trying to sleep here!"_ Nya's voice scolded from across the hall.

Whoops. He forgot all about her.

Lloyd ignored the weird sounds coming from underneath the floorboards, since Yang apparently lived there and was most likely just making something for himself to eat or fighting off some ghost-rats.

"Well, I guess we didn't wake Nya," Kai sassed. "I can't believe you shaved your head."

"I can't believe that you two didn't tell us that you were in a relationship!" Lloyd shot back.

Kai and Zane both looked so guilty that Lloyd wanted to apologize.

"Look, I'm sorry, I'm just…"

"It's okay," Kai told him. "We can't sleep either."

"Perhaps I could make some hot chocolate for us all to enjoy and we could be in a less grumpy mood when we wake up in the morning," Zane suggested.

"Great idea!" Kai told his no-longer secret boyfriend. "I'll go put on the water."

The sounds under the floorboards got louder.

Lloyd, unsure of what to do about that, stomped his feet against the floor until he heard a surprised scream from down there.

It didn't sound like Yang, so maybe he had a guest with him or something.

"That sounded like Jay," Zane told him and Kai. "But he's not a ghost, so it should impossible for him to get down there."

Kai and Lloyd nodded in agreement.

"Maybe we should invite their mother over for lunch tomorrow," Zane suggested. "She sounded as if she would enjoy seeing Morro."

"Who? That Julia woman?" Kai sounded as if the idea was ridiculous. "Look, if she was such good friends with the other Elemental Masters, then why don't they ever talk about her? Something's weird about her."

"Is it because she's Morro's mom or…"

Kai shook his head. "No, there's something else going on, something weird. You can invite her over, but I have to ask my parents what her thing is."

Zane put a titanium hand on Kai's shoulder. "Please behave tomorrow, okay?"

"You told me that you cancelled," Kai grumpily complained. "I told you that I don't want to deal with this woman until we know who exactly she is."

"Maybe we can learn more about Morro from her?" Lloyd suggested. "I mean, maybe some embarrassing stories about when he was a kid or something like that?"

"I know." Kai paused and turned his head towards Zane. "But that doesn't excuse _you_ telling me that you cancelled when you _obviously_ didn't."

Zane looked down at his feet, but he cheered up once they arrived in the kitchen, putting the milk on the stove and removing a bar of chocolate from the fridge with a smile on his face.

"So how long have you two been together?" Lloyd asked, watching the milk boil on the stove. "Was it long?"

"Actually," Zane hummed, "it's been almost a year and a half now. We were busy moving our rooms together when you and Nya called."

"And how were you planning on keeping that from us?" Lloyd sassed. "I know for a fact that we would have realised if one of you weren't sleeping in your own room anymore."

"Well, we were going to tell everyone eventually," Kai murmured, "but we weren't sure if we would be okay at first, and if we broke up, it would ruin everything, and then Jay overheard us at some point and when he confronted us, we really thought he was going to tell the media everything, like that time Cole hurt himself trying to do yoga."

Zane didn't seem at all upset that Kai just confessed that he thought they wouldn't be together long enough for it to matter, which Lloyd found seriously weird.

If he was dating someone and they just said, to his face, that the reason for not telling anyone that they were together was because they thought that their relationship wasn't going to last, he would not only break up with them on the spot, Lloyd was going to change his identity and move to Metalonia to become an isolated goat-herd in the mountains.

"You thought you were going to break up if this happened, and you still went ahead with this secret relationship?"

"I do not know if you have noticed, Lloyd," Zane spoke from the mugs, "but Kai and I are very different people."

Kai nodded in agreement. "We were worried that we were maybe a little _too_ different," he said, "but a year and a half later, and we're doing great."

There was still a little something that bothered Lloyd.

 _Two_ little somethings, actually.

"What about Pixal and Skylor?"

"Pixal encouraged me to ask Kai out," Zane confessed. "Before the fiasco with the Hands of Time."

"And Skylor?"

Kai shrugged. "We're okay, we're still friends."

A screaming sound came from beneath the floor, causing the three of them to tense up.

Then Yang came up from below, told them that he was sorry for freaking them out, he just saw a rat, and then he went back down.

"You look weird with your hair gone," Kai told Lloyd once the old ghost was back under the temple. "All that fluff, just… gone."

Lloyd put his hand to his head, which was getting kind of cold now without "all that fluff" to keep him warm.

"I wanted to get a Mohawk, but Cole didn't like it or something and he made the hairdresser take it off."

"I'd rather be bald than have a Mohawk," Kai told Lloyd, helping Zane pour the hot chocolate into their mugs. "Or have you come back with one."

"Maybe we could shave your head and the two of you could match," Zane suggested. His tone made it hard for Lloyd to know if he was joking or not, and Kai's horrified expression wasn't helping all that much either.

* * *

 **It's been a while since I updated this fic, and I'm sorry, I had a massive writer's block. Thank you for being patient.**


	18. Secret Tunnel: Part 2

_**Jay**_

Everything was loopy, as if the world was a video game that kept glitching at the worst possible time.

The first thing he was vaguely aware of was feeling hungry, so he opened the fridge, took a bite out of what was maybe an apple (it was red and round), and blacked out.

Next thing he knew, he was in the secret passages in the haunted temple, mumbling nonsense to the walls.

When he realised what he was doing, he stopped talking to himself and started going down the ladder, accidently spraining his ankle on the way down, and hitting the wall in front of him with his face, hopefully not breaking his nose, before deciding that he needed to find somewhere to sit before he hurt himself again.

With the grace of a drunken panda, Jay found his way to the room that Yang secretly used to eavesdrop on everyone back when he and his students were still alive, sitting there to get his head on straight.

He heard Cole freaking out over a "fruitgeble" above him, the others trying to calm him down, Zane offering to bake Cole a cake if he were to calm down, which worked for a moment.

Everything was getting a little too quiet, so Jay got up and moved around to see what else the others were talking about while he wasn't there to talk too much for them to say something.

" _I can't believe that he's your brother,"_ Zane's voice spoke from above. Maybe he was talking to Nya, but Jay was sitting in the spot dedicated to his own room. _"He never mentioned that you were related."_

Jay's blood froze in his veins when Morro's voice answered. _"Yeah, well, would_ you _tell everybody that the evil ghost who almost killed your entire team is your brother?"_

He wanted to pass out. His heart was beating too fast, the room was spinning and he was only slightly aware of Yang hovering there, looking concerned and saying something that just sounded like screaming.

As the screaming got louder, the old ghost's expression grew more and more worried, until a translucent green hand forced his mouth shut, causing the screaming to stop.

"I asked, are you okay?" Sensei Yang asked. "I won't tell your friends that you're here, but if you keep on screaming like that, somebody's going to realize that something's going on down here."

Oh, _he_ was the source of the screaming? Okay, that made sense. He was panicked and when he was panicked, he tended to scream bloody murder.

" _I_ _invited_ _your_ _mother_ _over_ _for_ _lunch_ _tomorrow,"_ Zane's voice spoke again. _"Is_ _there_ _anything_ _I_ _should_ _know_ _before_ _she_ _arrives?"_

"She's coming here," Jay whispered under his breath. "We can't have her here, no, please, don't bring her here…"

"I'm not going to let her in the secret tunnels, okay?" the ghost tried to reassure him. "And you're the only one who knows of them, so I don't think your friends are going to tell her either."

Jay nodded sleepily. "Why am I so tired?" He yawned, struggled to get up, and swayed right when he stood up. "I didn't even _do_ anything."

Yang didn't answer. He seemed to be listening to something upstairs.

"… _allergic_ _to_ _tea, but_ _I_ _think_ _she_ _just_ _made_ _that_ _up_ _because_ _she_ _doesn't_ _like_ _Wu."_ Jay looked up to where Morro's voice was coming from. _"She_ _kept_ _calling_ _him_ _and_ _Garmadon_ _all_ _kinds_ _of…"_

The dim green light coming from Sensei Yang made it much easier to find something to throw up at his room's floor to try and shut Morro up.

" _What_ _was_ _that?!"_ Morro's voice exclaimed, no longer talking about his mom.

" _I_ _think_ _it_ _was_ _one_ _of_ _the_ _pipes._ _They_ _can_ _get_ _very_ _noisy_ _at_ _times."_

"I think I left a flashlight here last time," Jay told Yang as he scanned the room. "Now… where did I put…"

As he crawled around the circular room, he heard Lloyd's panicked scream and Cole crying about having to break some spell before someone rotted.

" _Cole,_ _calm_ _down!"_ Lloyd's voice cried out. _"OW!"_

"What's wrong?" Jay tried to grab Yang, but he was a ghost. "Yang, what's wrong with Cole?!"

Yang put a ghostly hand on Jay's shoulder. "Look, I think you need calm down a little. I think I have something to help with that, but if you start screaming again, I won't give it to you."

Jay nodded, biting his tongue to avoid screaming again.

"Wait here, I'll get it for you."

Jay watched as the ghost left, then he stood up and left himself.

His head was spinning again, but thankfully, he didn't black out like before. Everything was spinning, actually, and Jay ran into something. Twice. Three times.

" _Hey! Cole! Stop that!"_ Jay looked up at the ceiling as he removed the splinter from his eyebrow. _"Zane! A little help, please?!"_

Things crashed above his head as Kai and Zane (judging by the sound of metal clanging all over the place) tackled Cole, who didn't sound to be completely okay.

" _Just let him have the tomato!"_

" _Aaargh!"_

" _Is that Ghoultar?"_

" _Stop chasing Ghoultar!"_

" _Hey, Cole, I have Jay!"_ Lloyd's voice sounded. _"Come and get him."_

" _Jay!"_

Jay hurried over to the exit leading to Cole's room, from where Lloyd's coaxing and Cole's excited mumbling were the loudest.

Very quietly, he watched his friends through a crack between the boards.

Lloyd was holding a tomato (?!) and was bald (?!), while Cole was eagerly and clumsily towards at it.

Then the newly bald ninja threw the tomato into the room, at which Cole hurried in after it like a dog and grabbed it, cradling it in his arms as if it was a baby.

"Don't worry, I'm going to make Ghoultar turn you back," Cole told the tomato.

"What?"

"Jay!" Cole seemed to think that it was the tomato that was speaking. "You can talk!"

Okay, this was weird enough.

Without even thinking, Jay opened the secret passage into Cole's room, crawled in, and promptly blacked out.

When he woke up, he was on the floor, under a pile of blankets, with someone sitting on him. His head hurt a lot, his ears were ringing and he was pretty sure that those were symptoms of a concussion.

"Come on, Cole, you _have_ to eat," Lloyd's begged. "Come on, it's been _hours_."

Something fell over, and whatever was sitting on Jay went away.

He waited until he heard the door close before he came out from underneath the covers and snuck back into the secret tunnels, before anyone could realise that he was there. But of course, considering that he was under a sheet when he woke up, someone might have already realized that he was there. Just not Lloyd, though.

Unfortunately, the tunnels got too dark after a while and he ran into things over and over again for goodness knows how long. He tried to use his lightning powers to make light for himself when he remembered that they existed, but for some reason, they didn't work.

No little blue sparks coming from his fingers, no electricity flowing through his veins, no lightning.

"Work! Work!"

Then something really weird happened.

Well, it wasn't _really_ weird, considering, but it was unexpected.

He accidentally smacked himself in the face using the element of wind.

What happened next, however, was to be expected.

He screamed.

His screaming caused Yang to come flying over to see if he was okay, quickly giving Jay something to drink to calm him down before he flew up to tell the others above that there was nothing to worry about, he just saw a rat.

Five minutes later, Jay remembered that there was still a tomato in Cole's room, and he was still hungry.

And sure, he could've gone to the kitchen to get something, but he didn't feel like facing the others at the moment.

Unfortunately, the first thing he stepped on when entering Cole's room was the Master of Earth's precious tomato.

He slipped, because apparently tomatoes are slippery, and his screams alerted Cole to his presence.

Cole was more worried about the tomato, crying as if someone had died, while Jay was more upset because he was hungry and he wanted to eat the dumb vegetable, but couldn't because it was now squished.

Then Cole seemed to realise something and turned around with wide brown eyes.

Jay took a careful step back.

Then he was picked up off the ground and hugged.

"You're alive! You're alive and you didn't explode and you're okay!"

* * *

 **Loopy Jay.  
**


End file.
